#ches 2023 booklist

[che-bur-ashka]

more people should read GENDER TROUBLE

(yo, howdy, hello, im trying to write a little about each of the books i read this year if i liked them or had anything to say about them. this might be the only post like this i ever do or this might be a regular thing. go hogwild you perverts)

So, first on my list of "books I've read and am talking about in 2023" is: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. I started reading it just a little before New Year's, and finished it last week, but I haven't gotten a chance to sit down and hammer something out about it until now.

As I finished what is, admittedly, a pretty difficult book in both its ideas and in the way Butler writes, I couldn't help but be struck by something — I think more people need to read Gender Trouble. There are a couple of reasons for that — I'm pro the public engaging with academic / theoretical texts generally — but, specifically, I think you, you, dear reader, should read Gender Trouble not just because it's a formative text in the development of queer and gender studies, not just because I get a kick out of talking about theoretical construction and want more people in my ecosystem to have read the book, and not just because you probably already think you know what's in Gender Trouble, and are wrong, because this book might be the most frequently mis-quoted (or when the quotes are done right, mis-applied) books of theory I can name. Please read this book for those reasons, too — there is so much more in this book than people think, and it is so much more radical in its thinking, and all that is lost when we only encounter big ideas two or three steps down the regurgitative grapevine.

I want you to read Gender Trouble because I think, difficult as the book might be, that this book is a fantastic jumping-off place to engage both with ongoing critical traditions in feminist and queer studies and the nightmare monster that is the partial application of those traditions that, brokenly, filters down to us as all-consuming "queer discourse." Dr. Butler is responding to a lot of things in this book, but at the core of it they are reacting to the feminist tendency to essentialize femininity — to essentialize it towards what are believed to be liberatory ends, but nonetheless to imagine femininity as a natural, immutable truth, and, in doing so, to sow the seeds of liberation's failure. This book was radical thirty years ago, and it remains radical now — radical, and only more applicable to the day-to-day lives and discourses of queer people. And, again, you just don’t get that aspect of it filtered through online misapplication of performance theory.

Anyway, there's more — of course there's more, it's a two-hundred page book, and I promised myself I was only going to write 250 words (currently: 493... 494... 495...). If y'all want more thoughts I'm reachable here or on twitter (come scream @ me baby) but for now, log off, go to the library, & read GENDER TROUBLE

#gender trouble #gender studies #queer studies #ches 2023 booklist #judith butler

[che-bur-ashka]

jesper juul's HALF-REAL is comfortable being half-wrong

(this is the 6th of my brief responses to the books i read in 2023. last time i talked about george saunder’s A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN. you can check out a full list over on my twitter)

I finished Jesper Juul’s Half-Real (2005, MIT Press, 233 pages) a few days ago, and I found it pretty interesting. I’m never entirely sure how to write these quick blurbs for the academic / nonfiction I read, partially because they can’t really function as summary and, given the nature of academia, there’s always going to be someone who’s done better critical response than I can 2-3 days out from a first-time read. I’ll try, anyway.I liked Juul’s book—in part, I think, because it is willing to be wrong.

Half-Real is a book chock full of apparent binaries—between emergent and intentional design, between narrative and rules, between classic models and new attempts to understand digital media. This is the kind of thing (especially in a rapidly changing space like games studies) that tends to make books absolutely unreadable, in my opinion—no matter how universal the person designing the new models and categories thinks they are, with twenty years of hindsight it becomes deeply apparent how specific and situational their thinking was. Consider Juul’s musing on the tension between what he calls “narratology” and “ludology”—a conversation which, though he was thinking in interesting ways when this book came out, has been ground into dust (and, more importantly, situated fundamentally differently) by the eternal discourse over “ludonarrative dissonance” which feels like it defined the 2010s. In this sense, reading Juul was a bit like reading Butler at the start of the year—I can’t help but approach the text in a different way than the author intended, in part because I can’t help but read it through decades of slow, misguided filtering outward into popular discourse.

That being said, I didn’t find Half-Real frustrating in the way I did, for instance, get annoyed at the datedness of James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us. That wasn’t because, like with Butler, I found a core of the text which was lost in the translation to popular conversation, but rather because—almost as fast as Juul is setting up systems and models—he seems to be willing to tear them down. He complicated every  binary he establishes, constantly attending to middle-points and edge cases in a way which doesn’t give you the sense of... let’s say unearned self-confidence you often get from people who think they’re writing field-defining theory (although I do think Juul’s book does position itself as potentially field-defining, in ways which the intervening decades have complicated and confirmed). So there’s my two-cents. Half-Real is good in part because it has really good thoughts, and in part because, in unpacking and self-reflecting on those thoughts, it gestures at the inevitable process of theoretical replacement in a way that is really soothing when you’re reading books old enough to be inaccurate but not so old as to be historical.

#ches 2023 booklist #half-real #jesper juul #game studies #video games #academic

[che-bur-ashka]

A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN is a good book that stumbles, suddenly, into Stalin.

(this is the 5th of my brief responses to the books i read in 2023. last time i talked about lemony snicket’s POISON FOR BREAKFAST. there’s also a rolling list over on my twitter)

I liked George Saunders’s book, A Swim In a Pond in the Rain, maybe more than I’ve every liked a how to write book before. For one thing, Saunders actually knows how to teach—too often, I think, successful writers get to talk about their method and pass that off as pedagogy, which it is not. In A Swim In a Pond in the Rain, on the other hand, you get the clear sense that Saunders not only understands how he writes, but understands how other people write—which is important, since I am, in fact, not George Saunders. This might be trite, but—it really does feel like you’re learning, when you read this book..

So I liked Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I liked it a lot, actually, especially as someone who—if you couldn’t tell—isn’t usually thrilled with how to write books. I just have one question, though: What does George Saunders know about Russia? 

The answer is—and he’s honest about this—not much. He’s taught courses on Russian literature, of course—courses from which the readings in this book are drawn.He has a number of Russian friends—who he gestures to as a source of information throughout the book. He has a deep love and a familiarity for the literary giants who he handles in this book—Tolstoy and Gogol and the rest—but when it comes to talking about Russia, which he does only a handful  of times, you are given the distinct impression that Saunders is beginning to fall flat. The most egregious of these moments is in the conclusion of the book, when he begins to muse on the legacy of the Stalinist purges, wondering whether the occasionally anti-Tsarist sympathies of these books might have played into Bolshevik hands. I’d be willing to hear this sort of an argument out, at least, in most cases, but here—where it is clearly mostly speculative—I couldn’t help but start to think (as Saunders teaches us to think!): what happens when americans evoke Russia? What work is done by the subtitle of this book? What has Saunders done in teaching only pre-Revolutionary stories?

I think it would be difficult to deny that, for most americans, invoking “Russia” summons either a nostalgic memory of the gilded Romanovs or (more commonly) the terrifying specter of Soviet brutalism—a specter which still lingers even in american perception of the post-Soviet era. With these dual ghosts in mind, we begin to view Russian history as defined by a kind of a bottleneck—a moment, in 1917, when romance died and industrial modernity seized control. This is certainly true in the invocation of the great Russian authors—all of whom, at least all of those known in the west, were conveniently located in the century leading up to the fall of the Romanovs. That’s the space Saunders is playing in—a nostalgic, Shen Yun-esque look at the cultural wealth of feudal Russia, haunted by the impending catastrophe in the form of the monarchy’s destruction. He’s wearing a kind of political horse blinders which, incidentally, means he seems entirely to overlook 70 years of artistic continuity which was no less complex nor politically muzzled than the century which came before.

If you are going to read this book, then—and I really suggest that you read this book—please merely keep in mind that Russian history did not end in 1917, nor 1937, nor 1991. Saunders is a genius at what he knows—but there are many places he steps, awkwardly, into things he does not.

#ches 2023 booklist #george saunders #a swim in a pond in the rain #russian literature #soviet literature