Beyond Selidor

This weekend feels more efficient than others so far this year — I've done almost everything I wanted to do, and it's only 1.30pm on Sunday!

Every year, I know this specific snowflake_challenge prompt is coming: In your own space, create a fanwork. And every year, I swear I'll start working on something so that it will be ready to post by the time the prompt comes around, and every year I end up being completely unprepared.





However, this year I'm lucky, in that threesentenceficathon is also happening, with some great prompts, and so I have fanworks ready to post! I've grouped all my fills together in an AO3 series, so if I fill more prompts, they can just get added on, but at the moment there are three ficlets posted. The fandoms covered so far are Greek mythology (Hades/Persephone), Peaky Blinders (Ada Shelby), and the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale (Rumpelstiltskin/Miller's Daughter). There are a couple of other prompts that caught my eye, so I'll see how many more I can add.

halfamoon will be running again this February. This is a fourteen-day fest focusing on female characters. Every two days, there's a new prompt, for which you can create fanworks, or share recs for other people's work that fits the prompt. The prompts list for this year is out in advance.

The detailed nomination statistics for last year's Hugo Awards have
finally been made public, and there seem to be a lot of problems (most notably, a number of works or individuals that were eligible for shortlisting and achieved the requisite number of votes to be shortlisted appear to have been arbitrarily ruled ineligible for reasons that are as yet unclear). Cora Buhlert's blog post is probably the best starting point, as it's a good summary in its own right, and links to pretty much every other piece of discussion of the matter.

Reading-wise it's been a slow week. I've only finished one book, The Last Sun (K.D. Edwards), the first in a series of urban fantasy books in which characters with supernatural abilities have washed up on the shores of Earth after their home in Atlantis was destroyed, and in which powerful, aristocratic Houses (based on tarot — the Tower, the Lovers, the Hermit and so on) vie for control of their new, closed community. Our point-of-view character is the last remaining survivor of the destroyed Sun House, and he works as a sort of supernatural private detective for hire.

It's incredibly tropey, everyone has incredibly angsty backstories and unresolved trauma, and in general I found it fun in an escapist sort of way. I wish more of the secondary characters were women, and that we got to know more of the interior lives of the female characters we do meet, but hopefully there's more of that as the series progresses — it's not going to stop me reading future books, nor indeed the free short stories that the author has posted online. In fact, once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to read any of those that fit chronologically with what I've read so far.

These past two weeks have caused a steady depletion of my mental energy, to the extent that I've retreated into a world of chefs and cooking. I've always cooked as an expression of love, and I always find reading cookbooks, chefs' Instagram accounts, and above all interviews and podcasts with professional chefs to be really cosy and relaxing. And so for the most part I've bounced between Nadiya Hussain's Instagram highlights and random interviews/panel discussions involving Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, or both. (There is some method in this madness: I was given the Jerusalem cookbook as a Christmas present, and the Falastin cookbook as a random gift by Matthias early on during lockdown, so I have been basically swimming in za'atar, pomegrante molasses, tahini, and the other repeat ingredients of the Ottolenghi/Tamimi oeuvre for the past few months.)

My favourite so far was this panel discussion between Tamimi and Ottolenghi several years ago when they were promoting their Jerusalem cookbook. They were constantly asked the most ridiculous things (and people seemed to want them to act as some sort of poster children for Israeli-Palestinian peaceful coexistence, as if their own personal circumstances, friendship and business partnership could somehow be expanded outwards to an entire fraught region; they resisted this as unrealistically sentimental and simplistic), but ultimately it's just an hour of two people geeking out about food and flavour. I feel their pain re: those dreadful premade refridgerated falafel sold in British supermarkets, which are an abomination.

I say that I've only had mental energy for cooking and foodie stuff, but that's not 100 per cent true. I've also read a bit of short fiction, mainly the newly unlocked stories in the current issue of Uncanny Magazine. My thoughts on all are behind the cut — every story is free to read online.

( Five short stories behind the cut )

What is getting you through the current ... everything?

I have lived in this country for more than a decade, and I have still not learnt the fundamental lesson: when planning to be outside for any length of time, first check the weather.

Yesterday Matthias and I, wanting to take advantage of the time afforded us by a four-day weekend, decided to spend the morning doing a long walk along the river. The walk itself would take more than two hours there and back. We left the house to sunny, windy weather — warm enough to wear t shirts, and spent the way out meandering among the cows, houseboats and bird life. Here's a photoset.

About a minute after the last photo was taken, when we were essentially the furthest it was possible to be from our house, it started pouring with rain, which lashed us horizontaly due to the howling wind. There are several pubs along the river, but of course due to lockdown they are all closed, so there wasn't even that option of waiting inside for the rain to ease — all we could do was trudge forward, in our t shirts, for an hour and a half until we arrived home. We were miserable and frozen, and I immediately ran a hot bath to warm up. By the time I'd thawed sufficienty, I was exhausted, and I ended up doing nothing between 3-6pm but lie in bed. This was, as you can imagine, not the way I had been planning to spend my Saturday!

Sunday so far has been a vast improvement — an extraordinarily lazy morning, eating crepes and tea for breakfast, chatting with my mother and sister via FaceTime (they're still in isolation in Sydney together, working from home, but Australia is gradually relaxing most of the lockdown restrictions, and I have to say I feel a bit of envy at them being able to sit in cafes, and, as of 1st June, go to the pool), and reading.

I've somehow ended up signed up for a programme through the publisher Hodderscape which gives UK resident participants their choice of a selection of free ebooks at set intervals throughout the year. (If you want to participate, you can sign up here — my understanding is that this is limited to UK residents only, but it might be worth double checking.) My first book was Honeycomb by Joanne Harris, a collection of weird, whimsical fairytales, most of which had an underlying bite. It's not a subtle book — there's a running strand of Animal Farm-esque political fables which are recognisable as parables about the rise of Trump and right-wing nationalism, aggrieved Gamergate types screaming that they're being silenced, and so on (one is even about the 2010 Lib Dem/Conservative coalition government in the UK, that's how unsubtle and specific they are) — but I enjoyed it a lot. 80 per cent of it is an unfolding series of stories about otherworldly beings, and their quests, lives, and loves, as they roam in and out of the human and other worlds, and the remaining 20 per cent is filled by those political fables. Often when modern authors try to invent or adapt fairytales the result is too syrupy for my tastes, too kind, but these keep that unearthly wildness, and that refusal to explain the workings of their world. Fairytales shouldn't require explanations: things within them just are, and you either accept that as a reader or not.

I discovered, through roshanichokshi, the existence of a webcomic called Lore Olympus, which as far as I can tell is a modern retelling of the Hades/Persephone story, so I guess that's what I'll be reading this afternoon!

What's everyone up to this weekend (not that time has any meaning in these times of lockdown)?

A lot of people have been sharing Yoon Ha Lee's post, 'The problem with problematic'. In it, yhlee responds to criticism levelled at Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series (the first book of which is up for a Hugo this year) by trans and/or nonbinary readers — criticism which has had the effect of removing a lot of nuance from responses to the series. Worse, as yhlee writes, this criticism has had the effect of erasing trans readers such as himself from the discussion altogether:

All this just to say--readers are so individual in their reactions that "never write something hurtful" is untenable.

I think this is related to the going trend these days, which is to ask authors not to write works that are "problematic." But what do we really mean by that? Analysis of, say, racist or sexist elements in media is valuable, and we need more of it. But sometimes what I see is not that, but "don't write problematic works" in the sense of "don't write things that I consider hurtful."

As I am neither trans nor nonbinary, I'm not going to dictate to trans/nonbinary people how they should respond to Palmer's books (which is not what yhlee is doing, either), except to say that I think yhlee is correct when he says that Palmer's future was a dystopia telling itself that it was a utopia, and that you cannot understand her novels unless you view them from this perspective.

However, like yhlee, I think this response to the Terra Ignota books is a symptom of a wider problem. I saw similar discussion around queer representation in Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, with a number of LGBT reviewers repulsed by the tragic fate of the book's queer characters, and a small minority adoring the book and feeling like their queer identities were being called into question for doing so. Amal El-Mohtar was one of the latter group, and wrote a blog post along those lines:

I’ve been watching conversations emerging — mostly on Twitter, mostly subtweeting, mostly in fits and starts — trying to categorize responses to the book according to some sort of ticky-box taxonomy of readers. I find this utterly repellent. Some people will suggest that only queer people have problems with the book, ergo it must write queer people’s lives poorly; others will counter with “well, Amal liked the book,” as if that could be the last word on the subject; still others will try to parse whether it’s my Brownness or my Queerness that has shaped my response, in pursuit of some sort of One True Response to the book.

I've not read this book, and again, I have no intention of dictating people's responses to it, or telling them that they should read a story which they are going to find upsetting and hurtful. What I find troubling is the idea that people — particularly those of (multiple) marginalised identities — feeling they have to march in ideological lockstep and respond in identical ways to identical stories, especially if there's an implication that a divergent opinion calls their marginalised identity into question (or that they have to pick and choose between one or the other of their marginalisations, as if responding to a story in a certain way means they've prioritised their identity as a POC over their identity as an LGBT person).

I have my own version of this regarding the rhetoric surrounding the 'proper' way to write women. For various reasons, partly because of my personal history, partly because of my lifelong narrative preferences, I respond much better — and will choose to read, watch or be fannish about — stories where the female characters are survivors of trauma, where their heroism has come at great cost, and where their powers are in spite of misogynistic pushback. I could list a thousand examples, but the first handful that spring to mind include the five Wives in Fury Road (victims of sexual violence), the clones in Orphan Black (who are quite literally viewed as patentable property without bodily autonomy), Jessica Jones in the Netflix TV series (a victim of sexual violence and mind-control), Laia from Sabaa Tahir's Ember in the Ashes series (who voluntarily allows herself to be enslaved in order to spy on her enemies, putting herself at constant risk of sexual and physical violence), Shahrzad from Renée Ahdieh's Wrath and the Dawn duology (a retelling of the 1001 Nights played fairly straight), Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy (an escaped slave with a traumatic history that's only hinted at, but which is fairly obvious if you read between the lines), Briseis and Chryseis from the Iliad (captured in war and victims of sexual violence) and Paige Mahoney from Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series, who begins the series in a very Stockholm Syndrome-y situation.

I'm not saying these are the only depictions of female characters that I respond to — some of my favourite stories entirely lack this element! — but these tend to be the fictional characters that are closest to my heart, whose stories I draw on at times when I need courage, and inspire the bulk of my fannish feelings and output. What I don't respond to, and what is very low on my list of narrative priorities, are female characters who enter their stories already powerful, suffer no trauma, and wear their power joyfully and lightly.

And yet I am constantly bombarded (at least in my corner of fandom) with categorical assertions that what female audiences want are untraumatised, joyful, uncomplicatedly happy female characters who revel in their power. This may be true for the vast majority of women and girls — as I said above, I have no intention of dictating others' storytelling preferences. But I'm told, in furious Tumblr post after furious Tumblr post, that the Whedonesque heroine — one who experiences her power as a kind of violation, and who fights at least in part as a response to trauma — is anathema, is unwanted, is hurtful to all female fans. But for me it is precisely this kind of character that gives me courage, because such characters tell me, over and over again, that I as a woman will survive, will be brave, will live on and find power in the support and community of other women, and that women with my experiences will get to be the protagonists of our own stories.

Most of the responses to yhlee's post (outside of the comments on the post itself) seem to have been along the lines of well, this gives us lots to chew on without really engaging in the points made. My feeling is that we'll never progress beyond this point unless people are prepared to talk about the broad spectrum of reactions to stories, and allow for this range of reactions without trying to police people's identities. I have it somewhat easy. I'm not exactly starved for narratives of my chosen type: the world abounds with stories of traumatised women taking back power for themselves, although of course some stories do it better than others. When it comes to depictions of more marginalised identities, the dearth of representation is much starker. This is precisely why the solution to bad or limited representation is not to enforce a uniform response to this representation, but rather to do everything in our power to encourage and enable more representation. (This obviously means significant structural changes to publishing, film- and television-making, and a huge amount of work in amplifying marginalised voices and making creative fields less hostile to creators of marginalised identities.) I believe enforcing a party line when it comes to people of marginalised identities responding to fictional marginalised characters is deeply harmful. I also believe that the cure for this problem is as many stories as possible, so that everyone is spoiled for choice when searching for stories that speak to them.

Day Twenty-Nine: A female-centric fic rec

Most of the fic I like is female-centric (the same goes for original fiction), so it was quite hard to make a choice here. I've narrowed it down to three fics.

The first is 'Rabbit' by sanguinity. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, with a focus on Jesse Flores. It's such a melancholy, emotional piece of writing, and captures a lot of the tone of the show itself, with its focus on destiny, free will, and the unbearable weight of history and time-travel.

'Mother Tongue' by elle_dritch is Earthsea fic focusing on the different women of the series, and on the notion of quiet, unnoticed 'women's work' that Ursula Le Guin explores in the Earthsea books.

Finally, have my favourite piece of fic ever: 'Words In The Margins' by Jenwryn. It's a character study of Orihime from Bleach (and I think is fairly canon-divergent), and it's hard for me to explain exactly why it appeals so much. I never watched or read Bleach, but I went through a phase of reading a lot of fic for it about five years ago, and something about this fic really caught my attention. I love that Orihime doesn't apologise for her choices, that she admits privately that she can't explain them even to herself, and that that's okay. I love that it's about monsters and humans, about monsters falling in love with humanity, and humans made monstrous. It's wonderful.

( The final day )

Day Twelve: Favorite female character in a movie

Ree (Winter's Bone)

Looking back at all the entries I've written for this meme so far, I think I have a type, or at least a few types of character that always appeal. Ree shares several qualities with my other favourites, most notably a very specific kind of bravery. It's a passive bravery: she endures, rather than acts, and she carries the burdens of those around her because others can't bear to. Her father is a drug dealer who's long since vanished from the scene, her mother is suffering from untreated mental illness, and her community has closed its doors to her. Ree is the only person trying to keep things together for her younger brother and sister. When it looks as if her family will lose their house unless she can find her father, Ree refuses to give up, and she embarks on an emotionally harrowing quest to bring him home.

I spoke in my entry on Peaky Blinders that it was a show about trauma, and male violence, and the way the women in the community tried to manage that violence. Winter's Bone explores similar themes, although Ree is too worn down, too cut off to have the power to direct and manipulate male violence in the way the women of Peaky Blinders do. Rather, she seeks to contain this violence in the hopes of keeping it from her door. As she continues her search for her father, she is exposed to greater and greater danger and ever increasing violence, as it leads her into corners the community would prefer to keep hidden.

The whole film has a sort of mythic quality. It deliberately emphasises the elements of katabasis in its story, as Ree's search for the truth takes her further and further away from light and hope. There's a fabulous scene towards the end of the film in which a group of women take her in a small boat on a river in the middle of the night, like some kind of Appalachian Persephone or Inanna. The river is inky, Ree is fearful, the women are stern and offer no comfort, and the whole thing is shot like a journey to the underworld.

Winter's Bone is not a very hopeful film, and you get the sense that the when the credits roll, Ree has succeeded only in keeping the storm at bay for a little longer, not that her life has much chance of improving. She should be able to endure all the torments the world throws at her, but she shouldn't have to.

( The other days )

Every so often, a book comes around that is just so perfectly written to engage with my own particular narrative tastes that it's as if it had been written just for me. The most recent such book is The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon. Not only is it as if Shannon sat down with me and made a list of all the things I most wanted to read - and then wrote a book to those specifications - but her playlist for the book is packed full of songs by my favourite artists. And if that's not enough, the song she describes as her protagonist's 'theme' is a song that I've long considered a sort of personal mantra.

Anyway, if you like urban fantasy, alternative versions of London, post-apocalyptic settings that offer hope rather than bleakness, young female protagonists who actually have support networks and female friends, underground networks of criminals operating as a sort of grey market for the dispossessed - in short, if you like all the things I like, you should check it out.

If you need more convincing, my review is here.

And if anyone else has read The Bone Season, I'd love to talk to you, because otherwise I fear this is going to go the way it normally does: namely, me being a lonely Fandom of One.

In other news, today is Matthias' birthday (and my sister Kitty's birthday too) and our anniversary. Yes, we got together three years ago on his birthday. He's currently at a librarian training event in Bury St Edmunds, and when I've finished my shift at work we're meeting up there to have an early dinner before heading back to town for another friend's birthday party. November is such a birthday month. This week alone held my sister Mim's birthday (which she shares with five other friends of mine), my dad's birthday (which he shares with the other friend whose party we're attending tonight) and Kitty's birthday. It seems a bit excessive!

So, whenever I feel a little bit battered by life, I retreat to the comfort classics: The Pagan Chronicles, Ugg boots and leggings, the music of The Sounds. And Buffy. I learnt my lesson the last time I rewatched during a depressive period: nothing beyond Season 3. Season 6, in the wrong mood, can send me into paralysed, despairing inertia.* In any case, I'm going slowly through the episodes, and am currently partway through Season 2. You should consider what follows behind the cut as containing spoilers for the entire series (comics excluded), though.

( Scattered thoughts on Buffy, with pictures and footnotes. Also be warned that I talk about the Hades and Persephone motif, which could stray into discussion of rape, so give it a miss if that's not content you want to see )
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*And yes, I am beyond my early worship of all things Joss Whedon. There are significant problems with all of his programs, Buffy included, and I have heard all the criticisms, think most of them have some weight, and understand why some people cannot get anything of value from Buffy. But I think as long as I acknowledge that I'm being a fan of problematic things, it's all right for me to find strength and value in the show.
**Unless it's told by Stephenie Meyer (because that's what Twilight is, really. Never before was there an author with such interesting ideas and such terrible execution. I'm still irritated that Meyer came up with the concept of The Host, because, seriously, a love triangle with only two bodies but three conscious beings is really intriguing.
***Please don't take this as a shipping thing. My Buffy OTP is Buffy/happiness.

My department is on Tumblr. If you like medieval geekery, and are on Tumblr, you should check it out! In related news, my boyfriend and a friend of ours have started up a blog where they translate Old English riddles and write commentary about them. (For those of you so inclined, Tolkien probably had these kinds of riddles in mind when writing the famous scene in The Hobbit.)

I'm reading The Iliad. I thought it was about time, considering how many adaptations and reworkings I've read (let us not speak of That Travesty of a Movie), including studying a course call The Literature of Troy as a undergrad (which looked at the medieval and Shakespearean versions of the story of Troilus and Cressida). I knew the basic shape of the story, I knew what happened, and yet I still found it extremely confronting to read. The problem was, I inevitably latched onto Briseis. That got me thinking about my whole way of reading/interacting with texts these days. I'm much more alert to issues of agency and voice, which characters are given words and which remain silent. So while I wasn't surprised by the presentation of Briseis, I feel very protective of her as a character, and I want very much to read adaptations of the Iliad that give her a voice. (My first port of call was fanfiction, but I found nothing, other than some stuff based on That Travesty of a Movie. Inevitably, Iliad fandom is all about the Achilles/Patroclus slash, and even more inevitably, Hector/Paris.) In any case, I need to think more about these things, and possibly write something more than these rambly musings.

Horrible Histories author Terry Deary wrote a diatribe against libraries. Foz Meadows wrote a powerful response:

And then, of course, there’s the moral/historical angle: “Because it’s been 150 years, we’ve got this idea that we’ve got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers,” Deary moans. “This is not the Victorian age, when we wanted to allow the impoverished access to literature. We pay for compulsory schooling to do that.”

The bolding above is my own, and it’s there for a reason. Take a good, long look at that sentence – specifically, at the crucial use and placement of the word wanted, whose past tense indicates that allowing the impoverished access to literature is something we don’t want to do any longer; or rather, that Deary believes we shouldn’t. There’s so much wrong with this statement that I hardly know where to begin. With the fact that, under Deary’s ideal system, the poor are only entitled to literature while they’re of school age, perhaps? With the fact that most of the literary benefit one experiences while a student comes, not from English class, but the school library? Or how about the novel idea that treating support of literacy in poverty as a quirky Victorian prerogative rather than an ongoing social necessity is not only morally repugnant, but incredibly shortsighted when one depends for one’s living on the existence of a literate, interested populace?

John Scalzi also responded:

I don’t use my local library like I used libraries when I was younger. But I want my local library, in no small part because I recognize that I am fortunate not to need my local library — but others do, and my connection with humanity extends beyond the front door of my house. My life was indisputably improved because those before me decided to put those libraries there. It would be stupid and selfish and shortsighted of me to declare, after having wrung all I could from them, that they serve no further purpose, or that the times have changed so much that they are obsolete. My library is used every single day that it is open, by the people who live here, children to senior citizens. They use the building, they use the Internet, they use the books. This is, as it happens, the exact opposite of what “obsolete” means. I am glad my library is here and I am glad to support it.

Every time I publish a new book — every time — the first hardcover copy goes to my wife and the second goes to the Bradford library. First because it makes me happy to do it: I love the idea of my book being in my library. Second because that means the library doesn’t have to spend money to buy my book, and can then use it to buy the book of another author — a small but nice way of paying it forward. Third because I wouldn’t be a writer without libraries, hard stop, end of story. Which means I wouldn’t have the life I have without libraries, hard stop, end of story.

I am, in no small part, the sum of what all those libraries I have listed above have made me. When I give my books to my local library, it’s my way of saying: Thank you. For all of it.

My own library story is similar, but different. What I will say is this: libraries gave me words. They gave me the words to understand myself, my space in the world, the people around me. They opened doors, they opened my mind, but it all comes back to the words. They gave me my voice.

I am so grateful.

I am grateful to Alex, for the music.

I am grateful to thelxiepia, for telling me to go for a walk to improve my mood and getting me the hell out of the house.

I am grateful to M, who, upon hearing of said walk, responded, 'you should take some music, because that always makes you happier'. It does indeed. Pretending it's the soundtrack to running away from zombies makes me happy, for some inexplicable reason.

And then this song came on. Honestly, there was no way I was going to feel sad when this was playing. This is the song that reminds me I can be strong, I can be brave, I can be happy and beautiful and feel wonder.

Sometimes I just need some tough love. True friends are not enablers, and I'm incredibly grateful to have them.

Not having internet at home (beyond the unreliable wifi the neighbours are kindly letting us use) is making me feel very awful. I think I'm going to have to be stricter with myself about stuff in order to avoid getting into such a state again. Thus:

No internet at home. I will be in the internet cafe in the evenings, but I'm not allowed to use it at home at all. (So no forums, sporadic blogging, no chat. For the sake of my sanity.)

Get up at 6 every morning and just run. No excuses. Doesn't matter how cold and dark it is, that's the rule.

Thesis. Every day.

Looking at my tags, I am all about the literary allusions to dispossession. One of these days I'll have to write something about that.