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mimeparadox · 3 years

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The New Half-Truths about Corsets

As true as it is that corsets are often misrepresented in audiovisual and written media, and as glad as I am to see people defending them, GOD, am I annoyed by the current discourse. Not because the defenders are wrong —they’re not, in general terms—but because Twitter, Instagram, and their incentivitization of easily digestible sound bites over nuance haves stripped the conversation from all the complexity inherent in a subject as big as corsets. In seeking to be more accurate, corset defenders have often just muddied the water further, with a brand-new set of half-truths.

Here are my favorite (least favorite) talking points.

“Corsets are literally just bras!”

As a cis dude, I’ve never had reason or occasion to wear bras. I have worn corsets, though, and let me tell you, things like having to take off one’s boots after one has been out in the snow while wearing a corset is work—moreso, I imagine, that if I’d been wearing a bra. Actually putting on boots before a corset? Even harder, enough that “boots before corsets” is a common bit of advice. Corsets aren’t torture, but they do force one to rethink how they interact with the world, in ways different than bras do.

To be less glib though, yes, corsets could and did provide the sort of breast support that is now provided by bras. This doesn’t render the multiple differences irrelevant! For one, breast support is the one thing bras are meant to do: with corsets, it is secondary or even inessential, evidenced by all the corsets that do not provide breast support, such as corsets for men, old-timey corsets for kids, and underbust corsets, which are still definitely corsets.

(Megan Fox in Jonah Hex, wearing a corset that is doing exactly the same thing as a bra. Yes, I know it’s not historically accurate; that is not the point.)

What most miffs me about this argument is that it is exceedingly reductive, and displays simplistic thinking regarding both corsets and bras. Because yes, corsets were like bras…and? What is this argument trying to say, given that bras their own baggage? Is the argument that corsets aren’t torture because corsets are bras? Plenty of people find bras uncomfortable, and something to be abandoned as soon as it becomes feasible. Corsets were purely practical because corsets are bras? Plenty of bras exist for primarily aesthetic purposes—some even do a fair amount of shaping. In the end, both garments have complicated, multifaceted, and distinct features, histories, and semiotics, and trying to equate them in a single sentence says nothing useful about either of them.

“Stays are not corsets!”

Amusingly, this argument seems somewhat incompatible with the previous one, given that stays have much more in common with corsets than with bras, but here we are.

Yes, 18th- and early 19th-century stays are significantly distinct from the corsets that we see later in the latter century, and if someone wants to don Bridgerton-inspired looks that accurately reflect Regency fashions, they should not look at Victorian corsets to obtain it. And yes, one can make the case that stays and corsets were entirely different animals.

Here’s the thing, though: historically, that’s not a case that people made. Corsets are we know them weren’t considered to be a completely different thing from stays, but rather a different style of stays—two different breeds of dog, perhaps, but dogs all the same. Once the term corset entered regular parlance, the two terms were usually used interchangeably, as can be seen in multiple 19th century documents, including technical ones where differences between the two, if they existed, would have been noted.

The Duties of a Lady's Maid: With Directions for Conduct, and Numerous Receipts for the Toilette (1825)

English Patents of Inventions, Specifications, 1865, 3186 - 3265 (1866)

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What’s more, it’s not until very recently that people began treating stays and corsets as altogether different things. Gone with the Wind, the book? The terms corsets and stays are used interchangeably. The Oxford English dictionary? Describes stays as a sort of corset. The longest-lasting site dedicated to corsets on the internet calls itself the Long Island Staylace Association, with no indication that doing so represented an inaccuracy on its part. Sure, Elizabeth Swann should have properly said “You like pain? Try wearing stays”—at least it one wanted to be more accurate (if not good: good writing is partly about making oneself understood). But speaking here, and now, looking backwards? Very few people are trying to be that precise.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that corsets have had a variety of styles and features throughout history, and the term is by no means exclusive to what we most often see as corsets. The S-shaped corsets from the Edwardian era are very different from Victorian corsets, as are the more girdle-like garments that followed. While not everything is a corset, I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that the term isn’t broad enough to include 18th-century stays.

Tightlacing, Part 1: “Almost nobody did it”

Statements about tightlacing annoy me more than most, largely because they involve clearer instances of wrongness, but also because they hit closer to home.

Tightlacing has always been an imprecisely defined term: Lucy Williams, one of the best-known contemporary champions of corsetry, talks a little bit about the various ways the term has been used in her post “Waist Training vs Tight Lacing – what’s the difference?” found on her site. Usually, it refers to a quantitative measure—your corset must reduce X amount to be considered tightlacing—although recently, the discourse appears to have adopted a more qualitative definition, applicable to any instance where someone is shown displaying discomfort at being laced into corsets, regardless of how tightly they are (or aren’t) being cinched.

(Left: Moi, wearing a custom corset from The Bad Button Corsetry; Right, Upper: Scene from Bridgerton; Right, Lower: Scene from Enola Holmes)

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Take, for example, the scene that has most recently caused a stir, from Bridgerton, where the character Prudence Featherington is seen grimacing as she is laced into her corset stays corset, while her sisters wince in sympathy and their mother, Portia, insists that she be laced tighter. Others have raised objections to this scene, focusing mainly on the fact that Portia’s mania for a smaller waist is anachronistic and makes little sense given fashions that de-emphasize the waist, but fewer have noted that for all the hemming and hawing that is being done by the characters, Prudence’s figure is ultimately not all that compressed, and seems perfectly in line with everybody else’s. Is what is been done to her tightlacing? A lot of people appear to think so! And yet, that assertion carries some implications. If Prudence is being forced to tightlace here, is everyone else with a comparable silhouette (again, pretty much everyone) also tightlacing? The answer is kind of important, especially if one also wants to claim that tightlacing was rare.

It’s worth noting that Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History, one of the seminal works on corsetry throughout history, doesn’t actually attempt to make a case for the rarity of tightlacing. What it does attempt is to determine the accuracy of claims that women regularly laced down to 18 inches, 16 inches, or even smaller measurements, which is not quite the same thing. When exploring the question by looking at collections of surviving corsets from the era, the book has this to say: "Statistics from the Symington Collection [...] indicate that out of 197 corsets, only one measured 18 inches. Another 11 (five per cent of the collection) were 19 inches. Most were 20 to 26 inches.” While Steele readily admits this is hardly conclusive evidence, she took it as a sign that women with 16-inch waists were nowhere near as common as accounts suggested they were. Case closed, asked and answered, no one tightlaced, right?

Well, no.

Again, it comes down to definitions. Even speaking quantitatively, very few people define tightlacing as “lacing down to nineteen inches or fewer” (certainly no woman in Bridgerton is that tightly laced). The consensus, rather, is that tightlacing is not about the size of the corseted waist, but about the size of the reduction. How much people cinched, however, cannot be determined by looking only at corsets, because doing so requires not only those corsets’ measurements (and even those don’t tell the whole story, given that they don’t necessarily indicate how tightly they were worn) but also the starting measurements of the people wearing them.

In other words, say someone with a 33-inch waist uses corsets to reduce their waist measurement to 25 inches. This, according to most definitions, would be considered tightlacing—a 24% reduction!—and yet the absolute measurements would be nothing to write home about. How is that reflected in Steele’s sample of corsets? Impossible to say. A 25-inch corset could also be worn by someone with a natural 27-inch waist.

What, then, can we say about the frequency of tightlacing? Well, if we’re talking about dramatic reductions of, say, more than four inches (a two-inch reduction, by the way, can look like this—again, more dramatic than what we see in Bridgerton) one can say, with a fair level of confidence, that it was probably not the norm. And yet, “not the norm” is itself a very broad category, and given the numbers involved, “a minority of people” can easily still be “loads and loads of people”, as seen, for example, with COVID-19. Even if two percent of the population who wore corsets tightlaced, that’s still hundreds of thousands of people—hardly “almost no one”, as some argue. And if wearing corsets as seen in Enola Holmes or Bridgerton counts as tightlacing, the number becomes even higher.

Tightlacing, Part 2: “Tightlacing is bad”

Perhaps not coincidentally, another element of the current corset discourse involves taking all the baggage usually assigned to corsetry in general and applying it to tightlacing instead. Corsets are not painful, goes the argument, but tightlacing is. Corsets are not unhealthy, but tightlacing is. People could do everyday things in corsets, they’ll say, but not when tightlaced. Arguments made against corsets in the 19th century were slander made by people who just hated women (another half-truth I have little time for), but are apparently utterly unobjectionable when applied to tightlacing. This, as many modern-day tightlacers will tell you, is bullshit, but it feels like an especially odd argument to make in light of everything else.

As in, what is the point? It feels a lot like saying “I’m not sex-negative, but having sex with more than X partners is icky.” And given the history-focused slant of the current discourse, it’s safe to believe that most people arguing against tightlacing are not people who have attempted it. There is, however, an existing community that will happily tell you, based on personal experience, what tightlacing is actually like.

So from personal experience: tightlacing may not be like wearing a bra, and there are definitely some considerations that you have to take while doing it— getting dressed, sitting down, and eating are all done differently when tightly laced—but this is more logistical than anything, and also applies to other things—running in steel-toed boots is much different from running in sneakers, and the advice when doing the former is often “don’t”. Additionally, the margin for error decreases the more tightly laced one is, but corsets aren’t special in that regard: proper care is much more important when one is flying a commercial jet than when one is flying a one-seater. But yes, you can do physical activity while tightlaced. Not necessarily the sort that you could do in exercise clothes, but then, the fact that suits are not optimized for running doesn’t make suits bad.

Tightlacing, in the end, is not really different from wearing a corset. Some people will like it, some will not, but ultimately, how pleasurable or how unpleasurable it is (it’s very pleasurable, in my book) depends on what you put into it, and that’s something quite a few people—not a majority, but also not “almost nobody”—who are often far more tightly laced than people in movies, would attest to, if people listened.

#Corset #Historical Fashion #Bridgerton #Enola Holmes #Tightlacing #Stays

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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I'm listening to the History on Fire podcast by Daniele Bolelli which is FANTASTIC for many reasons, but especially notable for me as an American is listening to American history as taught by a European who doesn't flinch from calling a spade a spade or Woodrow Wilson a white supremacist. It's startling and refreshing to not have that texas schoolboard whitewashed veneer applied to some of the Really Bad Shit done by Americans in our history.

Okay but like.... Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist, we know this, right?

Princeton University has now taken his name off their school of international affairs, which frankly I was not expecting them to do, because when this issue first arose in 2015, they did the usual hemming and hawing about how he had contributed to the nation, etc. But as noted when this protest first arose, Woodrow Wilson was super racist you guys. Aside from admiringly screening the KKK propaganda film Birth of a Nation in the White House in 1915, he was actually quoted in it (as noted in the link above). He resegregated the US civil service and threw civil rights leader Marcus Trotter out of the White House because “[Trotter’s] tone offends me.” He had managed to win the black vote in 1912 with vague promises to make things better, and then.... did not do that. His administration was also heavily staffed with white supremacists.

Wilson admittedly did try to enact economic protections for working-class Americans against large corporations, and he has a luster as a progressive international statesman because of WWI, but while his racial legacy abroad (and particularly in the context of colonialism) is complex, it’s still... well, extremely racist. The period between 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and 1923 (after the end of the Wilson presidency) has sometimes been called the nadir of American race relations, as all the gains from Reconstruction were rolled back, violent incidents including lynching became the norm (as well as the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 that we all just heard about thanks to the Orange One), and the Klan was politically empowered across America (not least by Wilson himself).

I think it’s important to note these things because Wilson would probably not come up on most people’s lists of racist or objectionable political figures, because a) as you note, Americans aren’t taught about this in the first place, and b) we like the idea that only the egregious George Wallace-esque types are or were actually racist, rather than examining it in the context of otherwise admired statesmen, as Wilson’s general legacy still is. I would also like to note that Abraham Lincoln, who is practically a figure of hero worship in American politics, remained far more concerned about the political Union than he ever was about black people, and used the Emancipation Proclamation to put pressure on the Confederacy, not because he was an anti-racist. He expressed opposition to slavery as an institution and by the time of his death was coming around to the idea of black citizenship, but he also said that “if I could save the Union without freeing one slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do that.” In other words, Lincoln’s attitudes on slavery and race also need closer study and awareness, and he is, after all, pretty much as uncontroversially saintlike as American presidents come.

The fact is that white Americans have been so coddled and pampered and shielded from reality that even discovering these very basic facts has come as a shock. You’d really think that in 2020 this wouldn’t be so goddamn controversial, but if nothing else, the sheer depths of this historical (mis)-education are now being brutally exposed, and everyone gets to see for themselves how a country full of “me-firsters” are now responsible for the dubious honor of the worst coronavirus response in the world/highest caseload. These two things really are connected. Ideology has almost completely replaced history, and while Trump has obviously accelerated and exposed that effort, America’s departure from reality has been going on for a long time. I’d like to say that will actually change now, but.... mmm.

Anyway, I’m glad that this podcast has been useful and enlightening to you. As you may know, I’m sitting over here as a historian watching all this happen with a mix of incredulity and despair about the way this country has simply not dealt with any of its shit because “we’re number one!” In general, Americans need to hear more about America from people outside it, because.... yeah. Yikes.

#history #history of racism #sharkflip #ask

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gdwessel · 3 years

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Sakura Genesis 2021 - 4/4/2021

The traditional Spring megacard has taken place, the first one since 2018. (2019′s was overtaken by G1 Supercard in New York, 2020′s cancelled due to the pandemic.) Hiromu Takahashi made a brief appearance before the first match as well. You can see it now on NJPWWorld, but, well... read on.

Sakura Genesis 2021 - 4/4/2021, Tokyo Ryogoku Kokugikan (NJPWWorld)

Taichi, Zack Sabre Jr. & DOUKI [SZKG] d. Tama Tonga, Tanga Loa & Jado [Bullet Club] (Sabre > Loa, European Clutch, 10:10)

Kazuchika Okada, Toru Yano, Hirooki Goto, Tomohiro Ishii & YOSHI-HASHI [CHAOS] v. EVIL, KENTA, Yujiro Takahashi, Taiji Ishimori & Dick Togo [Bullet Club] (Yano > Togo, Urakasumi, 11:37)

Great O-Khan, Jeff Cobb & X (X = Aaron Henare) [United Empire] d. Tetsuya Naito, SANADA & Shingo Takagi [Los Ingobernables] (Henare > SANADA, Streets Of Rage, 9:51)

Hiroshi Tanahashi & Satoshi Kojima d. Jay White & Bad Luck Fale [Bullet Club] (Tanahashi > Fale, High Fly Flow, 10:05)

IWGP Juniorheavyweight Tag Team Championship: SHO & YOH [CHAOS] d. El Desperado & Yoshinobu Kanemaru [SZKG] © (YOH > Kanemaru, Direct Drive, 20:48) - Desperado/Kanemaru fail their 1st defense - Roppongi 3K are the 65th champions

IWGP World Heavyweight Championship: Will Ospreay [United Empire] d. Kota Ibushi © (Stormbreaker, 30:13) - Ibushi fails his 1st defense of the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship - Ospreay is the 2nd champion

Immediately post-match, Jeff Cobb of the United Empire flattened Ibushi with a Tour Of The Islands. I expect there to be a grudge match there soon. Ospreay now holds two titles (including RevPro’s Undisputed British Heavyweight belt), and immediately called out Kazuchika Okada for his first defense, however Shingo Takagi interrupted that, and declared he wanted a shot at it. So, I guess it’s Shingo first, probably at Wrestling Dontaku, then presumably Okada at Dominion.

There is a lot to unpack here. After all the hemming and hawing on the part of both Kota Ibushi and New Japan Pro Wrestling about “becoming God,” unifying the titles, committing to an angle that clearly was not popular, the very first defense of the new title goes to Ospreay, whom Gedo and the bookers clearly like. However, between his antics both on social media, and #SpeakingOut, and the recent angle where he gave an OsCutter to Bea Priestley to show just how much he wanted the title that didn’t even go over well with the fans in attendance, this is a wrestler that has alienated a not-small chunk of the New Japan Pro Wrestling audience. It was clear that at some point, Ospreay was going to be IWGP champion. Nobody really expected it to be now, so soon after Ibushi won and unified the titles. This show was pretty United Empire-centric, however, so maybe we should have seen this coming. The fact of the matter is, NJPW have put their brand new main title on someone that legitimately repulses a portion of the NJPW audience.

The only real positive to take from this, is that historically, brand new IWGP champions generally (GENERALLY) have short first title reigns. Recent examples would include Tetsuya Naito, Jay White and EVIL. Historically, Big Van Vader, Tatsumi Fujinami, Riki Choshu, Shinsuke Nakamura and Masahiro Chono (his only reign, cut short due to injury) all had relatively short first reigns with few defenses. It’s the exceptions that you would expect, that have had more significant first reigns -- Antonio Inoki, Keiji Muto/Great Muta, Shinya Hashimoto, Kensuke Sasaki, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kazuchika Okada, AJ Styles, Kenny Omega. Kota Ibushi’s, frankly, is a little more inflated than it actually was, due to all the drama about unification, as well as the 2-night Wrestle Kingdom 15, making it seem longer than it actually was. I’m pretty sure Ospreay is not going to have a long reign, no longer than Dominion. They seem to be following the pattern of Tetsuya Naito c. 2016 with this storyline, so I expect Shingo to fall at Wrestling Dontaku (a la Tomohiro Ishii) with Okada once more winning this title at Dominion.

To keep up with the United Empire line of thought, the new X member was Toa Henare (so @damascenocs was right again), although going back to being billed as Aaron Henare. (I can’t quite seem to locate when and where he quit going by “Aaron Henry” before going to Henare, and then Toa Henare.) There is kind of a gross subtext here, with Henare being a New Zealander, aka a former British colony, and reverting from a “more native” sounding name like Toa Henare to going by a “civilized, colonial name” in Aaron Henare. Like so many things with regard to Will Ospreay, there is a distinct lack of reading the room here. On the other hand, I don’t actually MIND Henare being part of this, they needed to do something with him after just spinning his wheels in opening tag matches and only ever getting wins over Young Lions for the last few years. He has a new finisher too, sort of a Fisherman’s Death Valley Driver, called Streets Of Rage, a name I confess I love. Post-match, O-Khan attacked Naito’s knee with a chair, so I fully expect this feud to go on for a bit.

In other news about new moves, YOH returned to in-ring action today teaming with SHO, and delivered the winning blow to get the IWGP junior tag belts back around RPG3K’s waists. This new move is called Direct Drive, looks like a butterfly brainbuster or DDT (maybe a bit like Death Rider?). YOH then immediately challenged El Desperado for the IWGP Juniorheavyweight title, which would be YOH’s first-ever I believe. I fully expected this scenario to happen, only with SHO instead. But hey, YOH is back and that’s good.

Post-match, Tanahashi put Jay White into a Texas Cloverleaf, but also finally accepted Jay’s challenge for the NEVER Openweight strap. A challenge has been made by a Bullet Club tandem (KENTA, Yujiro, Ishimori) for the NEVER Openweight 6-Man belts held by Ishii/Goto/YOSHI-HASHI. And finally, Taichi demanded NJPW return the Iron Finger from Hell, implying the office has confiscated it. Hmm.

It wasn’t all bad, but the bad taste left by Will Ospreay and the United Empire, after all the hoopla about the IWGP World Heavyweight title, shows this may in fact be a long year for New Japan Pro Wrestling.

The next show is this Saturday, the beginning of the Wrestling Dontaku cycle. No lineups are announced yet. Probably later tonight or Monday sometime.

#NJPW #new japan pro wrestling #Sakura Genesis #njsg #Will Ospreay #IWGP World Heavyweight Championship #united empire #Aaron Henare #toa henare #Yoh #yohei komatsu #njpwworld

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lexpistachio · 7 years

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Hi lex, i had a question. Are there lgbtq books/comics that you enjoyed that you think are more representative and are narratively better than cp? If you do i would love to check more out and get a feel for the differences.

Not gonna lie, I’ve been hemming and hawing about how to answer this ask haha. But thank you for your q!!!

Yes, there are a lot of lgbt books/comics that I have enjoyed better than CP and that I think are narratively better and which treatment of LGBT issues I did find more satisfying.

But I’ve also read (and critiqued) CP by itself, like how I read any other works, and try to come up with things that are objectively enjoyable about it and things I don’t like about it in a vacuum. I wanted to shy away from making any comparisons, lest it be incongruous or void. I didn’t want to be unfair in comparing it to a work of a different medium or genre, or make hierarchies on works that tackle LGBT issues based on their treatment of it. And anyway, I feel like the brunt of my criticisms about CP has something to do with its abandonment of some of its storylines and its uncompelling character arcs and story. That is to say, I think… maybe any other well-structured, well-written story will do?

For instance, I just recently finished Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, and it’s a coming-of-age love story between two guys with a sizeable age difference, and further, it’s a story where there are no extrinsic deterrents to their relationship and what drives the story are just their feelings, how they act on it and don’t act on it, and y’all it doesn’t even tackle coming out, or homophobia; in those aspects, you can compare it to CP, and it just does a better job of addressing the issue of age difference or in general, just expressing the nature of desire and physicality and confusion that comes with First Love. The younger guy’s insecurity, while it was assuaged, never really went away, but at least it was addressed. Are the two works really comparable? No. But did I enjoy it better? Absolutely. And it’s the same for like, I guess 90% of LGBT works I’ve read vis a vis CP.

And I have read a lot of stuff. In the interest of full disclosure, I did grow up reading shonen-ai and yaoi?? If you know what those are, you won’t be surprised at how fluffy comics with “queer” characters has existed long before CP (or, while at it, how reminiscent zim*its is of a traditional yaoi pairing with the Hunky Seme and blushing virginal Uke; might be also why i hate the pairing for how i’ve seen that dynamics a million times before). Though I make no value judgments about yaoi, I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are a LOT of romance (and even scifi and fantasy) LGBT works that don’t focus on queer issues, and they aren’t less enjoyable for that fact. The key is deciding early on if queer issues such as homophobia is something to be dealt with in the comic’s universe, and not flip flop midway and ending lacklustre and lacking like how CP did it. I guess I wanted to address the point that our criticisms of its lack of discussion about stuff is waived because CP is “supposed to be fluffy”; I maintain that it’s worthy of criticism because it wasn’t consistent on its discussion. Shhh this stays as a secret lol but one of the earliest yaoi novel I remember reading was this pulp trashy novel Only The Ring Finger Knows and it’s about two guys falling for each other and navigating their relationship and living together and they don’t really face scrutiny for being gay. But all their insecurities and all the misunderstandings were addressed properly, and it’s not Man Booker material but I remember feeling satisfied.

In addition, I do believe that the Coming Out story where the protagonist comes out stronger™ for it is as cliche as they come.

One of the most nonchalant mention of sexuality that I can remember is from one of my favorite webcomics ever– The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal--when TJ gets asked if he’s gay and he replies, “I ping all I am ninja.” But it’s also a story about a POC who’s gay and trapped in an arranged marriage, but it doesn’t dwell on that and the story keeps moving. At the heart of that comic is just two guys finding themselves and falling in love while on a roadtrip. That’s as tropey as you get, and yet the character development is to die for.

There’s a lot of LGBT stories where the queerness aren’t used solely as a device to drive a larger story. There is A LOT.

Off the top of my head, Sarah Waters has historical novels like Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet that are more plot-driven, doesn’t deal with the queer issues, but have women falling in love and being happy together. Fingersmith is also where the movie The Handmaiden is based from, which if you haven’t watched, should. Some of David Levithan’s stories deal with homophobia, but most are just guys falling in love and being happy and cute. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life–a read I don’t recommend to anyone dear to me– has its protagonist fall in love with his Hollywood celebrity best friend (though I think the takeaway from this novel is that love doesn’t cure trauma, though people suffering from it can be happy) and there is no fuss about their queerness at all, and the book is actually nominated for a Man Booker.

There are also works like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (POC, LGBT), or Perry Moore’s Hero, or Tillie Walden’s autobiographical graphic novel Spinning (LGBT, sports) that are about coming-of-age and aren’t afraid to tackle the warping effect of homophobia, the feelings of shame and fear that comes with being queer in a realistic world, and yet did not demure to end on a hopeful note.

I know the webcomic Tripping Over You is but a fluffy slice-of-life that’s just two guys who are in a relationship, talking it out and that’s it?? And it’s satisfying, and I can’t help but highlight how the coming out story of one of its characters, Liam, to his father was nothing but his decision to make, despite all the hiding he did was affecting his relationship with his partner as well. That coming out arc was a blip in the larger story arcs that are… their relationship and about being adults.

And I mean you even have fanfics that include that feature its characters coming out, and I have read a disturbing amount of fics you guys, even hockey rpf featuring different pairings, that discuss the issues that CP seemed to present (but didn’t follow through on) in a better way. I remember this lowkey one about a beat reporter starting a relationship with a professional hockey player, and the difference in their status is addressed, financially and in other terms, and that both of them are fully cognizant about these things as they proceed with the relationship. And the hopeful coming out scenario is a product of playing out the consequences of it and the alternative. I also remember this moment in that fic where the main POV character deals with a panic attack with his partner present, and it’s so much powerful to me than anything CP has shown about mental health.

In terms of mental health, I remember reading Tobias and Guy which is as light and fluffy as you get when a guy (literally named Guy) falls in love with a demon guy, and has this arc when Guy dealt with depression while in that relationship, and it was short and succinct but dared one of its characters to at least ask “but his family are loving and are supportive of him. how can he think like that?” for the sake of expounding the topic. I think it’s an okay portrayal of how partners in a relationship might deal in a situation where on suffers from mental health illness. I feel like the show You’re The Worst has also been exemplary in that regard. SKAM’s season 3 deals with internal homophobia and mental health illness while in a relationship and coming out (with none of the backlash of homophobia like CP) but doesn’t deal with cliches, and remains as a compelling and moving story.

In terms of insight into sports, a notable read for me is Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger (LGBT, POC, Sports), as it treated the sport the characters are in as integral part of who they are, which, I think is an effective use of the sports as a genre. As a manga-reader though, I’ve been spoiled by sports manga which are the best! sports! comics! (Slam Dunk! Hajime no Ippo! Hikaru no Go!) because they deal with their respective sport with so much insight, aplomb and passion, viewed in the eyes of the hero who’s in a journey to triumph. In manga, even baking bread can be a sport haha. To be honest these sports comics don’t need to have an athlete’s insider info on the world it’s set in. They just have to be believable. CP, I think, lacks both believability and insight, and more importantly, a deep tangible way the sports affects its protagonist. I find that so unsatisfying. I’m looking forward to how well C.S. Pacat’s Fence does.

My favorite college slice-of-life comic isn’t LGBT however, but it’s about a group of occasionally-starved college students in an art school. I read/saw the anime when I was in high school and has since stuck with me. I was equally invested in each of the characters’ storylines, not much like how I lost interest in CP after Rans and Holster and Shitty and Lardo were relegated to the fawning supportive straight friends stereotypes. The main romance doesn’t detract from the characters having their own stories and careers they want to fulfill. Even the POV character, who wasn’t my fave, had an endearing and compelling story.

As a bottomline: I don’t think there is a holy grail of lgbt works insomuch as they subjectively appeals to us. These are just some works that stand out to my memory and there are various takeaways from each for our purpose of comparison, but there are tons of material out there, LGBT and otherwise. SERIOUSLY. And I think there’s nothing wrong with trying it out one work at a time, see if it pings you. Trust your judgment friend!

#this answer is A MESS i'm sorry #omgcheckplease #omgcp #omgcp_critical #lukestarrunner

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pornosophical · 7 years

Quote

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory, well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier. The voices dissolved into the warm pre-dawn darkness as I watched vomit drip between the ferns and fallen leaves. Muttering consolations, my friend held my elbow. Only moments before we had been making impassioned if sloshy love in my single bed, while my 21st birthday party raged outside. Now I was hurling what seemed like a infinite fount of bile into the bushes behind my little room. As my friend led me to bed, I thought: You really are 21 now. You got horribly drunk, dragged a guy to bed, and then got sick. Just like a made-for-TV movie. These thoughts were accompanied by an odd, abstracted rapture I have come to take for granted. For want of a better term, I'll call it the rapture of irony. Halfway to my bed, I must have laughed out loud, because my friend asked, "What are you thinking about?" "The narrative," was all I could manage. I wanted him to know that even in this humiliated, impaired state, I was fully cognizant of the mind boggling paradox of the situation. I may have been a walking cliché but at least I was self-conscious.

Carol Lloyd, I Was Michel Foucault’s Love Slave

As I drifted off into a tangle of dehydrated nightmares, I comforted myself with the thought that Theory had suffused my life so thoroughly that I couldn't get laid, get drunk and get sick without paying homage to Roland Barthes' notion of the "artifice of realism" or Baudrillard's "simulacra." Though now I live a practical life, with more actions and fewer theories, I still struggle with the convoluted mind-set of my higher education. Even after years of trying to acclimate myself to a more concrete world, this odd theology lives in me so much so that it is only recently that I have recognized it for what it is: a religious doctrine.

I am a child of Theory. I avoided this truth because I didn't want to confront the deep, strange river of pretentiousness that courses in my veins. But lately I've begun to think my predicament is less reflective of a private eccentricity than of a weird historical moment. The moment when the most arcane, elitist mental gymnastics Theory in all its hybrid forms was reborn as sexy, politically radical action. The moment when well-meaning liberal intellectuals who a decade before had dedicated themselves to activism, volunteerism and building social programs turned inward, tending to their private experiential gardens with obsessive diligence. Theory offered intellectuals the same escape from the public world that self-help and therapy offered the masses. But unlike self-help and therapy, which never claimed to be anything but psycho-spiritual Darwinism, Theory draped itself in revolutionary verbiage and pretended to be a political movement. For those of us who got liberal educations in the wake of this shift, being radical meant little more than voting when it was convenient, reading the newspaper and thinking about doing charity work. The only thing that separated us from the ignorant masses was our intellectual opinions, which we shrouded in baroque revolutionary rhetoric. The "tyranny of grammar," the "subversion of sexual mores in extinct Native American tribes," and the "colonialism of the novel" these were our mantles of honor. Though I always believed that my upbringing was free of ideological trappings, I now see that the seed was planted long before I reached college. My eldest brother was a political activist in his teens, but with the onslaught of the '80s he threw away his ideals and pursued the good life: drinking from the corporate tit as an organizational consultant. After two years in Africa as Peace Corps volunteers, my parents shed their activist habits, moving to a resort town with the intention of getting rich building houses for retired millionaires. Aside from the little holes punched in their secret ballots and token checks made out to various nonprofit organizations, politically my family acted no differently than our blue-blood, conservative neighbors. They pursued the free market with a vengeance, bought as many nice things as possible and hobnobbed at the tennis club. But they still talked like the lefties they once had been. And how they talked. At dinner we served up steaming topical cauldrons of death, child rearing, art and gender, then skewered them whole. We asked unanswerable questions and then imperiously proceeded to invent the answers. We had no interest in facts. Facts were just things you made up to win arguments. Once I brought home a boyfriend whose old-fashioned education and conservative family had taught him none of the liberal preference for ideas over facts. When the dinner conversation turned toward his hobby of California history and he began to speak in facts, my family paused to stare at him like he was sporting antennae. My mother hemmed; my father hawed; my brothers began to babble invented statistics. Through my family I learned to love ideas "for their own sake," which made me a kind of idiot savant (with emphasis on the idiot) and a prime victim for the God of Theory. In 1978 my high school history teacher, a Harvard-educated, Jewish-turned-Catholic New Yorker, promised to give "extra credit" to anyone who read and did a book report on Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight." (Though later exposed as a Nazi sympathizer, at that moment de Man still carried the mantle of "subversive" in the hippest sense.) Dutifully, I read every page understanding it the way a little boy understands the gurgles of his toad. I had no idea what it meant but the densely knotted language of ideas made my head implode and my body sing. For the rest of my high school years I would only have to read a paragraph or two of deconstruction's steamy prose to have a literary orgasm. In his recent disavowal of literary criticism in Lingua Franca, Frank Lentricchia confesses that his "silent encounters with literature are ravishingly pleasurable, like erotic transport." My experiences with Theory were equally exalted delivering me into a paroxysm of overdetermined signs. In the blurry vertigo of those pages so full of incomprehensible printed matter I felt myself in the presence of a God: the God of complex questions, the God of language's mysteries, the God of meaning severed from the painful and demanding particularity of experience. In abstractions, I found absolution from a world in which I was utterly unprepared for any real responsibility or sacrifice. By surrendering myself to Theory, "reality" became a blank screen upon which I projected my political fantasies. My feelings of responsibility to a world that I had once recognized as both unjust and astoundingly concrete, slowly and painlessly seeped out of me until all that remained was the "consciousness" of the "complexity" of any "serious issue." I didn't need to fix anything, utterance was all, and all I needed were the words long and tentacled enough to entrap meaning for a slippery, textual moment. Like any religion, Theory provided perks to the pious. In my freshman year, I took an upper-division class on the 17th century English novel. The books were long and difficult but I secured my standing in the class when I responded to the teacher's mention of deconstructive theory. "Yes, each idea undermines itself," I parroted, channeling the memory of my sophomore extra credit report. "Paul de Man says..." With that bit of arcane spittle, I hit pay dirt. The teacher gave me such a hyperbolic recommendation, I was able to transfer to a better school. Once there, I evaded undergraduate classes with their demanding finals and multiple writing assignments and insinuated myself into graduate theory seminars of all departments: anthropology, literature, political science, theater, history. With a host of other would-be intellectuals, I honed the fine art of thinking about thinking about ... What we were thinking about was always pretty irrelevant. I developed minor expertise in the representation of the hermaphrodite in psychiatric literature, the uncanny relationship between classical ballet and the absolutist state of Louis XIV and the woman as landscape in Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy." Now I was just warming up, I told myself. Someday I would find an important issue worthy of all my well-exercised mental muscles and then watch out hegemony! While I was being treated to the many joys of a great liberal education, I was also learning some rather insidious lessons. I discovered I didn't have to read the entire assigned book. After all, the "ideas" were what was important. Better to read the criticism about the book. Better yet, read the criticism of the criticism and my teachers would not only be impressed but a little intimidated. By extension, I learned not only a way of reading but a way of living. The more removed I was from a primary act, the more valuable it was. Why scoop soup at the homeless shelter when you could say something interesting about how naive it was to think that feeding people really helped them when really what was needed was structural change. My friends now fall into two categories: ex-Theory nerds (like me) making a living off their late-learned pragmatism, and those who still live and breathe by Theory's fragrant vapors political theorists, literary critics, historians, eternal graduate students. I love talking to them and often I covet the little thrones their ideas get to perch on. Yet when I come away from a conversation that has swooped from the racist implications of early French embalming techniques to the "revolutionary interventions" in the margins of "Tristram Shandy" and ended with the appalling hypocrisy of the right wing, I often feel a strange discomfort. Because these are some of the smartest, kindest and most energetic people I know, I cannot resist the question: Is this the best way for them to spend their lives? If they acknowledged that they were largely engaged in the amoral endeavor of pure intellectual play, that would be one thing, but each of these people considers their work deeply, emphatically political. Is this theory-heavy, fact-free education teaching people to preach one way and live another? Are we learning that political opinion, however finely crafted, is a legitimate substitute for action? Sometimes it seems that the increased political emphasis on language the controversies over "chairpersons," "people of color" and "youth-at-risk" did more than create a friendly linguistic landscape, it gave liberals something to do, to argue about, to write about, while the right wing took over the country, precinct by precinct. After all, in a world where each lousy word can stir up a raging debate, why worry about the hard, dull work of food distribution or waste management? I know how high and mighty this sounds, and the side of me that appreciates subtlety and disdains brow-beating is wincing. Political moralism has fallen from fashion, leaving us to cobble together myopic philosophies from warmed-over New Age thinkers like Deepak Chopra or archaic scriptures like the Bible. If it's any consolation, I include myself in the most offending group of educated progressives who squandered their political power over white wine and words like "instantiation." Moreover, I'm not saying we're all a bunch of awful, selfish people. We learned to read, we learned to think critically and at least pay lip service to certain values of justice, egalitarianism and questioning authority. But I do wonder if we're handicapped, publicly impaired somehow. Like most of my siblings of Theory, from time to time I have tried to get off my duff and do something concrete: protest, precinct walk, do volunteer work whatever but I always get impatient. I wasn't meant to chant annoying rhymes. I am trained to relish complexity, to never simplify a thought. I am trained to appreciate "difference" (between skin tones and truths), but I don't know how to organize a political meeting, create a strategy or make a long-term commitment to a social organization. As Wallace Shawn wrote in "The Fever," "The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life my behavior, my actions that's a slim volume and I've never read it." Lentricchia argues that by politicizing the experience of reading, we ended up degrading its beauty and pleasure. In the same fell swoop, we also robbed concrete political action of its meaning. The progressive pragmatists studied political theory; the progressive idealists studied literary theory; and the eccentric radicals became conceptual artists and sold their work to millionaires. In any case, everyone bought the idea that they were engaged in political work. Having a radical opinion was tantamount to revolution. Back in college, I remember going to a party at the home of one of my professors, who was a famous Marxist. The split-level house was decorated with rare antiques from all over the world, exclusive labels filled the wine cellar, the banquet table overflowed with delicacies. Like an anointed inner circle of acolytes, we students sat around as our professors argued that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was justified from the perspective of the underpaid Palestinian servants who worked in Kuwaiti homes. The following month, while I was house-sitting at the professor's house, his black gardener came to the door wanting to be paid. I discovered that my professor was paying the man minimum wage for less than a half day of self-employed work. That night as I plundered the refrigerator for the best cheeses that money could buy, I chided myself for not having doubled the man's wages. But that might have embarrassed him, no? It definitely would have embarrassed me. It would have been acting on a belief, and action makes me uncomfortable. Recently I went to a conference on "Women's Art and Activism." I found precious little of either. Instead I found a lot of Theory garbed in its many costumes. There was a lesbian conceptual artist talking about her work, triangular boxes that "undermined the patriarchy of shapes"; a "revolutionary" poet lecturing on her experience of biculturalism; and an "anarchist" performance artist discussing "strategies for subversion." And what fabulous haircuts! The keynote speaker was Orlon, a French performance artist whose work consists of having her entire face rebuilt by plastic surgery. After a very French explanation as to why she needed a third face lift, she answered questions from the packed house. "I think you're just incredible," said one woman. "You say your aim is to reconquer your body as signifier. How do you feel about letting a doctor touch your signifier? And how do you see your revolutionary techniques emancipating women from the prisons of their bodies as sign?" Had I stumbled into a satanic ritual, I couldn't have felt a more chilling sensation of alienation. Once I would have smiled at these liturgies and savored their impenetrable truths. Now I only wanted to run away and do what? Dig a ditch? Perform open heart surgery? Administrate a charity? Even after all these years, I was still expecting Theory to visit me like the Virgin Mary and give me more than a sign.

#I was michel foucault's love slave #carol lloyd #theory #writing

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ampharos-writes · 4 years

Text

Memoir

Archivist’s Note: The text from the following statement is excerpted from a historical document - an old letter, discovered in the attic of a condemned home and delivered to the Institute for archiving and analysis. The contents of this letter should make it clear WHY it was entrusted into our care. Details regarding the “statement” have been filled in by institute staff.

Statement #9191101 Author’s Name: John Hawthorne Nature of Incident: The nature and circumstances of his death Date and Location: Letter dated November 1st, 1919; recovered from a home in Lexington, Virginia, USA on March 5th, 2020

Statement

Dearest Father,

I write these words to you, of course, knowing full well that there is no way that you will ever be able to read them. Once I was young and idealistic and believed in the great Kingdom of Heaven, but over the course of my life and the events that have transpired within I have become convinced that God and His Kingdom are nothing but the wishful thinking of so many hopeful fools atop this doomed rock, and that all that awaits us at the conclusion of our time upon it is an eternity of cold unfeeling nothingness, a sheer black Void which at the end of our days does consume all that once lived and breathed and grew and flourished and prospered and withered and faded and died.

You must forgive me, as I am getting ahead of myself. No, I am of course aware that you cannot read these words, but in writing them I am perhaps hoping for one last shred of blissful hope myself, one last tiny morsel of catharsis, as I feel my own time drawing near, and I cannot help but dread it down to the deepest part of my soul.

Have you ever died, father? I suppose that’s a foolish question. A better one might be, “Do you know what it feels like to die?”, as I imagine that at this current juncture you’re much incapable of knowing much of anything at all.

I know what it feels like to die. I know it all too well.

I knew it first when Tom and I ran and played by the old creek, when play-fighting turned decidedly more real, when rough hands shoved my lighter frame down into the rushing rapids and a hidden stone lodged itself deep within the back of my skull, when blood rushed out of my head and water rushed into my lungs, when everything went white with pain and then black with nothing, and I was no more.

And then I wasn’t. I woke up the next day, half-blinded by pain, too stiff to move. The poor doctor hovering inches above me blanched as if he’d seen a ghost, and perhaps he had. I remember him shakily asking me to roll over, remember laying on my side for what felt like forever, listening to him hem and haw and poke and prod and examine and ask “does this hurt?” (yes) and “how do you feel?” (bad) and eventually clear his throat and wander off.

Behind a door they thought was thicker than it was, I heard the doctor discussing in hushed tones with mother. He said that I was bleeding much less than I should have been, that the wound looked much cleaner, that I should make a full recovery after copious bedrest. I remember my mother saying that it must have been a miracle, that we had all truly been blessed. I do not believe anything could be further from the truth.

I know that you knew nothing of these events, father, as mother decided that she would rather not worry you, nor did she wish to inspire anger towards Tom, for both she and I knew that what had happened was not his intent, and that his crying at my bedside for the entirety of my confinement was proof enough of that. I must belatedly apologize for this deception, and further admit that while it was the first, it was certainly not the last.

I recall the first time Tom died, too, though I obviously know not what went through his head during the events that transpired. What I DO know is that his recovery from that illness he underwent as a teenager was not nearly as ordinary as we both convinced the hapless physician overseeing him to tell you that it was. In truth, Tom could have, should have, and did in fact pass away from his disease, but the unfeeling end rejected him as it had me, and his condition improved rapidly with no scientific or medical explanation to back it.

Admittedly, as young men this did contribute to our more… reckless endeavors. How could it not have? I know you saw us both as foolhardy braggarts keen to rush into danger for even the slightest chance at glory, but it was all an act, for neither of us relished the thought of fighting an overseer we never knew for a country we barely cared about. No, it was not brashness that drove us to enlist when the minutemen came calling, but a grim sense of duty. We had each died once or twice more by then, enough to know that for whatever reason our lives refused to be cut short, and we felt a moral obligation to harness this towards a purpose that, for whatever reason, people seemed to believe to be righteous and true.

I fell but once in the battles that ensued, to a bayonet wound that grew gangrenous. I hid my discomfort from the others in my regiment, of course; I imagined it would be more tolerable to fight through the pain for the few days I had remaining than it would be to explain away the aftermath of such a wound. Tom claims to have fallen three times, but I was only personally witness to two of them: a musket ball right between his eyes, and a dozen horses briefly reducing him to a tattered facsimile of a human being, before he opened his eyes and quite literally put himself together.

He was always the more brazen of us, Tom was. I was ever-cautious, equal parts humbled by our apparent gift and fearful that it might one day fail us. Tom was under no such compunctions, and after receiving a taste for danger in that great war for freedom he remained something of a frontiersman and a daredevil, constantly venturing out into the wilderness with nothing but his old musket and a canteen.

You knew all of this, of course, just as you knew that I settled down and attempted to put the past behind me, to make something of a normal life. Tom and I stayed in touch, of course, but I have no idea how many times he perished on his expeditions, and that was perfectly fine by me. I had steady employment and a family to look after. The prospect of pushing my luck in a manner such that he had was completely antithetical to my entire nature.

Of course, all the caution in the world is useless against the ravages of our TRUE father. One can evade death as many times as they wish, but their body shall nevertheless weaken and wither with age, their once-bright eyes growing dimmer, their once-proud posture stooping ever lower, their once-unending vigor suddenly draining away with every step they take, until finally they are no more. Ironically enough it was I who father time came for first, as Tom was evidently in better physical condition than I and remained spry well past the age of 80. You and mother were of course long gone by this point, and my sons had both been killed in the second British war, so the only people I had left to comfort me were Elizabeth and Tom.

Both were with me as I lay in bed, too exhausted to move and barely alert enough to speak. Both were with me as my hands dropped from theirs, as the blankets began to feel as if they were enveloping my very soul, as the world began to go dark. Both were with me as faint whispers danced on the edges of my hearing, bearing secrets I could not hear and would not comprehend, as the edges of my mouth crept upwards into a smile, and my eyes finally allowed themselves to close.

Of course, given that I’m here to tell of it, you may correctly assume that this was not the end of my story, and indeed my eyes did not remain shut for long, as the gentle warmth I bore within me suddenly swelled into a searing inferno, sending shooting stabs of agony into every fiber of my being, and my eyes snapped open, and I screamed. It lasted an eternity. It was over in an instant. It matters not. The concept of time itself, I have come to conclude, is as vague and fluid as anything else we like to assume we know about this world.

Whatever the case, what had started did in fact stop at some point, and the first thing I noticed was that I felt… different. Different, but not unfamiliar. It took me a moment to pinpoint what exactly this feeling was: I felt strong. Able. More able than I had in a long time.

I looked at my hands. Gone were the folds and spots of age. Here were the hands of a young man, able to do the powerful work necessary for a young man to succeed in this life. The same was true everywhere I looked, everywhere I examined upon my person. I hadn’t just died. I had been reborn.

My dear sweet Elizabeth had fainted, of course, and poor Tom was too busy gaping at me to help her. We got her into a chair and got her some water, and after confirming that she was still of sound mind and that I wasn’t some demon or malevolent spirit, we explained to her all that had brought us to this point. I didn’t expect her to believe me, but… perhaps there are some miracles in this world.

It was an… odd next few years. Tom had all but moved in with us, waiting for his OWN rebirth, which none of us had any reason to disbelieve would be coming. Elizabeth and I remained madly in love, of course, but there was this strange sort of distance that had cropped up. I would occasionally catch her staring at me with a look that I couldn’t quite place, or shooting glances at Tom that were outright hostile. I of course attempted to make inquiries about the nature of this, but was repeatedly rebuffed, as she insisted that of course everything was fine, and that I was worrying far too much, and should be enjoying my newfound youth. This prospect, frankly speaking, was tempting enough that I tended to agree with her, and spared little thought to my previous concerns.

The darkest day of my life dawned bright and cold. Winter was fast upon us, and Tom had been up before the sun in an attempt to fetch some firewood. Personally, I suspected that he was intentionally trying to wear himself out, in an effort to speed up his own rebirth, but I saw no reason to try to stop him. Elizabeth was already out of bed when I awoke, and I contented myself to simply lay atop the sheets and enjoy the gentle rays creeping in through the window, listening to the love of my life puttering around in the kitchen. In a moment of weakness, I permitted myself to slip into a bit of a flight of fancy, imagining that my lifelong connection with this woman had perhaps extended my curse to her as well, and that she too would be reborn, for us to jointly enjoy a life eternal. It would be… nice.

My daydreaming was interrupted by a terrible, gut-wrenching scream.

I’ll admit to only remembering flashes of the rest of the day. The shock of an event so terrible would do that to anyone, I think. I recall bolting from bed and running through the house. I remember Elizabeth, lying on the ground, her blood pooling atop her chest where a pale and trembling hand still clutched the kitchen knife. I remember the look on her face, equal parts anger and melancholy and regret. I remember she said something as the last of her life slipped away, but I don’t remember if I replied.

I don’t remember Tom returning home, but he must have. I assume he would have found me still standing there, just… looking at her. I don’t remember him guiding me out the door or across town to his own modest lodgings, though I do have vague images of his own rebirth a few short days later. His face was much the same as I recalled it, though tinged with the unmistakable wisdom of age.

To this day, I don’t know why she did it.

The next few years passed in a blur. There wasn’t much I wanted to do except drink and mope, and Tom was of no mind to stop me from doing so. They say that time heals all wounds, but I think that gives time too much credit. I find that wounds deep enough will always leave a scar - enough that you’re not actively bleeding out, but still weaker than the surrounding area, and cementing the memory of the events that created it deep within one’s psyche. So after a few years of my sullen stupor, the wound did indeed began to scar, and I attempted to figure out what I was going to do with what appeared to be my now-unending life.

Of course, at this point Tom and I lapsed into the hedonism one would expect of any two men in their physical primes who believed themselves to have truly and permanently cheated death. We drank, gambled, traveled, hunted, partook in all sorts of activities that sane men would have balked at a hundred times over. Tom fought for the south on a lark, the smug bastard, and you’d be fool to believe that I haven’t lorded our victory over him ever since. We performed odd jobs when we needed money and lived like vagrants when we didn’t. For the first time in my afterlife, I felt like I was truly living.

It was when the Grand Columbian Exposition came to town that we finally learned more of the nature of our situation. Not from the event itself, of course; the nature of our anomalous qualities bears only a tenuous connection to what most people know to be reality, and thus an exposition of such prestige would nary venture to go near exploring it. The prestige and attention that the event brought to Chicago, however, brought with it a fair number of hangers-on hoping to absorb some of the prosperity they figured would be in fair abundance, and it was in the dimly-lit stall of one such vendor that we sought our wisdom.

She claimed to be an oracle from the slopes of Olympus, able to divine the threads of fate and feel out their general trajectory both past and present. Of course, I assumed this was all fairly nonsense - though it was fairly plain that she was at least telling the truth about her Mediterranean origins - but it had been Tom’s idea, and we had nothing better to do. I recall jokingly confiding in Tom that our cover was about to be blown. As it turns out, I was right.

There was no crystal ball, no light show, no smoke and spectacle. She simply sat us down at a small table and stared, hard, at the both of us, fingertips slowly tracing lines we could neither see nor feel. A heavy stillness filled the air, and despite it being a warm summer’s day I suddenly felt very, very cold. When she finally spoke, it was as if she was looking right through me, and I realized with a start that she was very clearly blind.

“Never have I seen the strands of fate so closely intertwined. When one strand is cut, the other patches the gap, until both are so thoroughly entangled that they cannot progress any further. Fate shall not continue Her weaving unless one severs the knot.”

Her voice reverberated through my ears, their meaning clear as day. I shakily slapped a bill down on the table and the two of us fled into the now-too-bright afternoon.

So this is the crux of my tale, father. While Tom lives I cannot die, and the reverse is true as well. We were born together, have lived together, and must die together. Confident as we were at the time, we believed this fate avoidable, and easily so: we would simply have each other’s backs, protecting each other from dangerous circumstances, and we would be fine. Given that this was how we had been living anyways, it seemed almost trivially simple to continue to wind our knot.

But these are curious times, father. The Great War came and went, and out of an abundance of caution neither of us served, but it may spell the end of us anyways. We learned of the Black Plague in the schoolhouse, of course, but this isn’t that. This is something far more insidious. It doesn’t make itself evident with boils and pustules and the overpowering smell of rot and decay. It begins as a common cold, one that simply refuses to go away, that buckles down and ingrains its presence within its host, until it simply saps the life out of them. Dehydration, starvation, breathing problems - no matter the method, the end result is the same. And it’s the one outcome where having each other’s backs may have done more harm than good.

As I write this, Tom lays in the bed next to me, his forehead slick with sweat, his sleep restless, his breathing shallow. My own hand trembles as I write, and were I not writing to a man over a hundred years deceased I would fear for the legibility of it all. I can feel the plague doing its insidious work all throughout my body. Everything hurts, and I know that it will not stop hurting until the end, and that this time it truly will be THE end.

I would say that I lived without regrets, but Tom has always been better at deceiving you than I have. If I am wrong about everything, don’t bother to pass on my regards, as I shall give them myself. If I am right... well, I could do with a rest.

Forever Yours, John

Statement

Historical documents tend to be very, very good at piquing my interest, but this one has been a bit of a dead end. Public record keeping tends to be rather haphazard this far back, and the name Hawthorne is a bit too common in colonial America to truly be of any use. Beyond verifying that the letter truly is as old as it claims to be, there’s little we can do here.

I DID ask Lissa to speak with the man who delivered this, a Mr. Nathan Finch. He read the letter and claimed no knowledge of any family or acquaintances by the name Hawthorne, though he admitted that his mother, one Persephone Theopoulos, had passed away when he was young, and that he knew little to nothing about that side of his family.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Finch discovered the letter through his work with the American Historical Society, and has no personal connection to Lexington, Virginia or the house therein. He himself resides in Chicago, Illinois.

-Amy A. Ampharos, Head Archivist June 1, 2020

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kmalexander · 4 years

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Yeah, It’s Still Weird

Lately, I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like. Like everyone else, this shelter-in-place/stay-at-home/stay-indoors/quarantine/pick-your-homebound-term life has disrupted a lot of my normal flow. Creative work still haunts me, but it’s easy to find myself distracted and not doing the stuff I want to be doing. I know I’m not alone. A lot of my fellow creators are feeling it as well. That being said, it’s odd—in all honesty, the day-to-day in the Alexander household hasn’t changed all that much. We’re both fortunate we can work from home, and work has certainly continued. Recently I’ve gotten a few questions from readers, so in the vein of John Scalzi, I’m going to answer those questions through a self-interview.

So hey, where’s Gleam Upon the Waves?

Hmmm, right off the bat, eh? I figured this question would come, and I have an answer for it. Work has continued in fits and starts, despite me feeling weirdly oppressed by the world right now. It’s sitting at 106k words—which means it’s grown a little (sidebar says it was near 100k when it was “done”) as I’ve clarified or added bits and pieces to the whole. It feels like it’s in a pretty good place now. The initial goal was to try a launch in 2020. But, like everything else in the world, I’m playing that by ear now—we’ll have to wait and see what happens. In the meantime, I’ve also started working on some short stories set in the universe as well, and I’ll be releasing those for free. So stick around. Follow along, we’ll be back to the Territories before you know it.

What about map stuff?

I haven’t completely abandoned my mapping projects. But they’ve taken a backseat to other creative work after finishing my goal last year. I’ve found a few wonderful sources that I feel will be great additions to the set as a whole, and I’ll keep plugging away with the intent to release more sets. In the meantime, if you’ve used my brushes in your maps, please shoot me a message and let me see ’em! I love seeing how they get used.

Also, over on Twitter, John Hornor Jacobs asked if I had any brushes to help people map out dungeons. I don’t, but the request got me thinking. I could see some benefits and uses in floorplan-style brushes. As with my other sets, I’ll want to make sure they’re historically accurate and rooted in antiquity. So, we’ll see how I do finding sources.

Anything new around here?

Yeah, actually. I have a few new posts in the works, and I still have more Raunch Reviews coming. I have a Trip Report queued, but I haven’t launched it yet. It documents our trip to Portland we took back in January for Kari-Lise’s birthday. It was a blast and mostly filled with loads of eating. But, it feels kinda odd looking back now, with the world in so much turmoil January was like a lifetime ago. So I keep hemming and hawing over releasing it or not—I will eventually—but it makes me miss restaurants, people, and normal life.

There’s also a plan in the works where soon I’ll begin interviewing my writer friends. They’re good people, and they write good books, and—since I don’t have anything fresh right now—I decided I should step out of my own book world and promote them. So stay tuned!

So, like… how are you feeling?

Fine, and yet weird. Kari-Lise and I are both healthy. I’ve been dealing with some allergy issues, but they’ve mostly subsided. We’ve been at home for three weeks now, and as I said, our day-to-day hasn’t changed all that much. I’ve got some low-key anxiety these days, which isn’t something I’ve really experienced before—mostly me worried about the health and livelihood of friends and family.

I know a lot of freelancers, artists, and small business owners, and the economic downturn has been particularly rough on all of them. So please keep them in mind when we emerge from this. Those books, movies, music, poetry, art, and so on—those things keeping us sane as we’re all at home—yeah, artists made those. Art is essential, especially in times like these, let’s remember that on the other side.

Hopefully, that answers some questions. If you have anything else, you want to ask me, feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment below. Life in my household has settled into a bit of a rhythm. We’re looking into making our own masks for the times we need to get out of the house. We avoid social media these days. Seattle remains on lockdown for the foreseeable future—at least through May 4th, but I think it’ll be extended. I honestly don’t see how any of this changes until widespread testing is available for everyone. Until then, we’ll all be living in a perpetual state of what-if and rolling the dice with the health of friends and family, and it’s hard to operate in a society where that is happening.

I’m very grateful for our governor and the local officials handling the virus here in Washington State. The response has been phenomenal, and I feel very proud to be a Washingtonian. They made hard decisions early, and it’s made a big difference. Seattle was once the hotspot for this outbreak, and every day we fall further down the list. Staying home saves lives and it shows.

I know I’m not alone in feeling grateful for the doctors and nurses who face this daily. Those people are heroes, and they deserve our utmost admiration and honor. I’m also thankful for the people still making sure we have power and internet and running water. I’m grateful for the folks who make deliveries, carry the mail, pick up the garbage, and work in the grocery stores. They’re also heroes. It’s been encouraging to see validation that “low skill” workers are, in fact, critical to our society. They should be compensated accordingly for their labor and service—I just wish it didn’t take a pandemic to open some people’s eyes. My hope is we’ll see a change when this is all over.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Wash your hands.

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republicstandard · 6 years

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New Frontiers of Social Justice

“The enemy of subversive thought is not suppression, but publication: truth has no need to fear the light of day; fallacies wither under it. The unpopular views of today are the commonplaces of tomorrow, and in any case the wise man wants to hear both sides of every question.”-Sir Stanley Unwin

Not long ago, while visiting a friend, I was in a city where one of the major hospitals runs these ads placed on the side of public transportation saying something to the effect of, “We care for all patients” against a rainbow flag backdrop. This is textbook virtue-signaling. Does the Hippocratic Oath not state that you must care for all patients to the best of your ability anyway? What does the implied “inclusiveness” of gender have to do with it? I suppose there’s some wiggle room; after all, you’re also not meant to perform abortions, but like the Constitution, the Hippocratic Oath is a “living document” I guess. The torturing of language has become so commonplace at this point that people are becoming immune to it, but we need to be very careful not to cede any linguistic territory to the Left. This is one of their key strategies, and if it sounds like I’m talking about a war, well…just look at the kind of language they use: “ally,” “combat,” “agent,” “coalition,” “collusion,” etc.

MSNBC host Joy Reid thinks rural Americans are a “core threat” to democracy. I’m not sure how much of that is posturing, but according to University of Wyoming professors Keonghee Tao Han and Jacqueline Leonard in the article “Why Diversity Matters in Rural America,” published by the Urban Review, “women faculty of color” in particular need to bring the joys of diversity to the last vestiges of America not touched by it through the Trojan Horse of the academy, where not only more faculty (especially women) of color must be employed, but a whole “support team” of people of color must be hired and trained in order to combat “racism” and “bigotry.” The authors summarize their work as follows:

Using critical race theory as an analytical framework to examine White privilege and institutional racism, two teacher educators, in a rural predominantly White university tell counterstories about teaching for social justice in literacy and mathematics education courses… We, women faculty of color, challenge Whiteness and institutional racism with the hopes of: (1) promoting social justice teaching in order to globally prepare (pre-and-in-service) teachers and educational leaders to motivate and empower ALL students to learn; (2) dismantling racism to promote better wellbeing for women faculty of color; and (3) moving educational communities at large closer toward equitable education, which is a fundamental civil right.

This article is a perfect snapshot of where the minds of academia and the “intellectual elites” of this country are. It’s all there: the feminist critique, the inherent racism of (white, rural) homogeneity, the Marxist twist in the form of “equitable education,” the appeals to open borders and globalism, and finally, the self-contained world of academia that continues to perpetuate “knowledge” based on subjective experience and a perversion of formerly respected disciplines. This self-justifying twaddle exists in a “safe space” un-encroached upon by logic, reason, or reality. It’s so easy to write this dross; I could pump this stuff out at a staggering clip. It’s comically easy. Virtually none of it requires any research, and what little there is is either taken out of context, willfully misrepresented, or refers to the similarly-constructed and equally intellectually bankrupt “work” of race and gender “theorists.” Good ideas are good ideas, I don’t care where they come from. There aren’t any here, but there is plenty of Frankfurt School post-modernism and its attendant corollaries such as post-colonialism and gender theory to make up for the lack of original thought. The few definite claims made in this article, after the requisite hemming and hawing about “problematizing” this-and-that, are patently absurd and most are downright harmful.

No terms in the article are precisely defined, the basic framework operates from, as Peter Boghossian has helpfully illustrated, “manufactured epistemology,” and the conflation of a university in rural America with rural America is very disingenuous as they are not even remotely the same thing. And there are questions, so many unanswered questions: What does “challenging whiteness” entail outside of simply existing as a minority in Wyoming and a slew of “raising awareness”-style vagaries? What are some concrete examples of institutional racism? Why do the students need to be “globally prepared”? Why is Han, an “Asian-American,” considered to be a “woman of color” when Northeast Asians otherwise fail to register on the oppression hierarchy? Additionally, I fail to see the pertinence of privilege and racism to literacy and mathematics education, or what the connection is between racism and womanhood, or what, indeed, is meant by “equitable education.”

After reading it in its entirety, and having had to translate it from “academia-ese,” I can confirm that the proposal is, effectively, to use the academy to ferry more diversity into the few remaining pockets of America that are “suffering” from homogeneity, areas that would not otherwise be “enriched” without the academy (or the Section 8 voucher program that has destroyed places like Ferguson, Missouri, by displacing whites with a more “urban” demographic). The two professors do not explain to us why diversity is a good thing—in fact, people in homogeneous areas look far more kindly on the concept of diversity than do people that actually experience diversity on a regular basis. Diversity atomizes communities and erodes trust, health, and well-being in affected areas. Like so much else that suffices for “research” in the “soft sciences” and humanities in the modern academy, this article is almost entirely self-referential and provides the reader with nothing of substance, nothing that could credibly be deemed an argument in the proper sense of the word, and little beyond the hectoring self-righteousness of two people who believe their race imbues them with some kind of inherent superiority over the stump-toothed rednecks they look down their noses at.

As one example of what I’m talking about, many of critical race theory’s earliest touch-stones include the subjective observations of authors (not researchers, not scientists) such as Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, post-modernists like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said (the founding father of post-colonialism), and the mixed-race W.E.B. DuBois who is, to use the One Drop Rule the Left strictly adheres to, “African-American.” The “lens” used by Han and Leonard also includes an interrogation of “whiteness,” commonly placed under the critical race theory scholastic sub-heading, Critical Whiteness Studies. As Barbara Applebaum informs us:

“Critical Whiteness Studies is a growing body of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege.”

Invisible structures. Got that?

Applebaum also says, “For generations, scholars of color, among them Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin (my note: not scholars), and Franz Fanon, have maintained that whiteness lies at the center of the problem of racism” (how exactly is never illuminated with specifics). I wonder if, as “scholars of color,” writing, by the way, during a radically different period in terms of race relations—ie, Jim Crow and the last vestiges of colonialism—they might have drawn conclusions based on their “lived experiences” that may not still be relevant today? I’ve noticed basically every “scholar” of race in contemporary society, when not “de-constructing” “implicit bias” or “invisible structures of ‘racism,’” always dwells incessantly on historical events, events oftentimes beyond any living person’s existence, before ultimately trying to conflate past injustices such as slavery with perceived contemporary injustices by using weasel phrases like “the legacy of which is still with us today,” “the likes of which still exists, albeit in a different form,” or some other imprecise cop-out. Again, no contemporary or non-subjective evidence is ever provided, save fictionalized narratives such as the Michael Brown “incident,” and no argument, other than impossibly broad phrases like “systemic racism” or “invisible structures” (I just love that one), is formulated. Without any kind of specificity, it is impossible to take this kind of “scholarship” seriously.

The basis for “systemic oppression” has now become so broad that, according to Lorraine Code, “Knowing is a political activity.” In Margaret Mead’s terms, “Ignorance excludes groups and individuals from the future by trapping them in co-generational struggles that are prolonged by inherited Western colonialism and enduring political paradigms of what the future should be rather than what can evolve if all voices contribute.” Foucault seemed to believe that there were no absolutes, and that it wasn’t merely a question of knowledge versus ignorance, but of “multiple knowledges.” More on Foucault in a bit. For Kristie Dotson:

Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. The tendency to shy away from using the term “epistemic oppression” may follow from an assumption that epistemic forms of oppression are generally reducible to social and political forms of oppression. While I agree that many exclusions that compromise one’s ability to contribute to the production of knowledge can be reducible to social and political forms of oppression, there still exists distinctly irreducible forms of epistemic oppression.

We are now literally in the realm of the intangible. First “invisible structures,” and now “epistemic oppression.” Epistemic advantage, the inverse of the force of exclusionary knowledge production, is defined by Uma Narayan as “[the oppressed] having knowledge of the practices of both their own contexts and those of their oppressors.” Knowledge production, having received its Marxist bath, becomes another frontier from which to combat “exclusionary practices.” Vanderbilt professor Jose Medina expands:

Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical approach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting oppression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970’s. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but how, by whom, and with what effects. I highlight the critical possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism in Anglo-America.

What he’s referring to is what McWhorter has to say about the most tolerant and open cultural inheritance in human history:

By foregrounding historical material that hegemonic histories and official policies have de-emphasized or dismissed, they [the genealogical researchers] have created an erudite account of scientific racism and eugenics, and in so doing they have critiqued received views and called into question some aspects of the epistemologies that support them.

Though the Left is convinced the study of genetic differences will lead to eugenic policies, which inevitably lead to genocide, they somehow support Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger. There’s an abortion clinic in practically every inner-city neighborhood. The Left throws their entire weight behind Planned Parenthood and demands federal funding for an organization that specializes in terminating, at a disproportionate clip, the identity voting blocs so coveted by the Democratic Party. Since half of all black babies end up aborted, tell me again how black lives matter, Leftists. Where the Left does not support eugenic policies, they implement ones that are decidedly dysgenic, as the welfare state incentivizes certain partner selection that ultimately has deleterious effects on the gene pool, and the onerous taxes foisted on the middle class renders procreation a luxury. What epistemology are they talking about, the one propped up by the entire academic establishment for disciplines like theirs that are wholly illegitimate? Medina informs us:

“In the 1975-76 lectures, ‘Society Must Be Defended,’ Foucault draws a contrast between ‘the genealogy of knowledges’ and any kind of linear intellectual history such as the history of the sciences: whereas the latter is located at ‘the cognition-truth axis,’ ‘the genealogy of knowledges is located on a different axis, namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice—clash of power axis.’”

I touched on this a while ago in my articles on Rome, but it warrants further discussion here. Foucault is situating this entirely new paradigm of “knowledge” completely outside of cognition and truth. It is fundamentally anti-intellectual and based on pure subjectivity. The “experiential quality” of “the oppressed” becomes the basis for “legitimate” scholarship. As the Combahee River Collective puts it:

“We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters have ever been looked at before. No one has ever mentioned the multilayered text of black women’s lives.”

What does that mean? We can see the impact that Foucault and his ilk’s “counter-histories” have had on the educational experience of every American under the age of forty; the primary events in American history were portrayed as Columbus’s legacy of subjugation and destruction of the native peoples of the “New World,” the Civil War (which was, we are taught only about slavery), large-scale immigration via Ellis Island, and the Civil Rights Movement. The little we learn about the Founding Fathers is that they were slave-holders and their legacy is a racist, oppressive country.

For their crimes, as determined by today’s Cult-Marxists, this legacy must be completely dismantled, and this dismantling must include the United States of America itself.

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bookandcover · 7 years

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George Saunders! He is, in my opinion, one of the most innovative and unapologetic contemporary fiction writers. Tenth of December had a significant impact on me emotionally, as well as on my understanding of the capacity of short stories to capture complex thematic content. Saunders portrays moral and ethical dilemmas with ever-expanding intricacy and nuance. He innovates with form and structure in a way that seems distinctly “poetic” to me, as he plays with pacing, syntax, and fragmentation on the page—to get at something more true to meaning, character identity, and realism of expression.

I followed up Tenth of December with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which fell flat for me in comparison. There is a lot more unity of style and content across CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which could be a perceived strength, but I was engaged by the versatility and diversity of Tenth of December.

I read Tenth of December after my sister met George Saunders when he came to speak at her college class. She recommended this book from the list of contemporary reading assigned. Then I raved about it. My mom read it. She raved about. Most of our friends and family members read it. I remember by grandma crying when she called to tell us she’d finished the book. She seemed unable to explain why and how it had moved her so deeply, but it had.

To a certain extent, I think the emotions and glamour of Tenth of December (of particular stories) set my expectations overwhelmingly high for this novel. I felt repeatedly surprised by this novel. It wasn’t what I was expecting. After expressing that I expected Saunders to apply his insightful mind to the ongoing role of classism, racism, and sexism in the 21st century (which is what compelled me most about Tenth of December) I laughed at myself for saying “Why a historical novel? Why the Civil War?” because, of course, I’d also read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (the time period and its “trappings” seem to fascinate Saunders).

Parts of the novel do feel like what I think of as “distinctly Saunders.” The narratives of the ghosts of slaves and their role within the bardo, their physical position within an unmarked mass grave, the contempt (and blatant racism) of many of the white ghosts—this section of the book felt familiar to me.

The structure of the book is surprising and Saunders embraces the concept fully—pulling us into the world of disjointed narrative without explanation (would I have been deeply confused if I hadn’t read the front flap first and understood the bardo, the death of Willie Lincoln, and the historical framework of the novel? This full embrace of concept is, I think, one of the strengths of the novel. Saunders is going for it. We stay within the bardo. We dig deep with these characters. We care about Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, in all their perfections and imperfections (I loved Roger Bevins waxing poetical on the sensations of the world, the ineffable beauty of the world). We see their growth and transformation. This strange chorus of ghostly voices isn’t a literary exercise. The world of the bardo and its conventions aren’t broken. We’re asked to accept as ordinary that such figures would be our literary protagonists. I respect that. There’s no philosophical hemming-and-hawing. There’s very little judgment. That’s something Saunders does well—exposing the broken and the decaying, the weak and the sympathetic, the struggling and the selfish. Without judgment.

I think his vision of the bardo, in which the thing from the mortal world that the ghosts cannot let go of physically overwhelms them, is very telling. These spirits remain in transition because of their obsession and persistence, not because of the judgment of a greater God. Here is a subjective morality. One of the most mysterious parts of the book, for me, is the Reverend Everly Thomas’s experience of moving beyond the bardo in which he sees the two other men with him examined—then one is rewarded and one punished. He sees that his fate is punishment, but he cannot understand why. Is this the future that awaits each ghost who, with the matterlightblooming phenomenon, moves past the bardo? Or is it the subjective future that awaits only the Reverend, shaped by his understanding of the universe and morality in life? It seems unlike Saunders to be so objective as to give everyone a final judgment. He doesn’t show Reverend Everly Thomas as he moves beyond the bardo for his second, and final, time.

One thing I’m always on the lookout for with Saunders is creative language. Saunders wildly manipulates the conventions of language in a way that I love for its lack of artistry. All of these moments seem to me to be genuine attempts to have language better approximate the world and experiences. The term “matterlightblooming phenomenon” is an excellent example. This phenomenon seems so far beyond the capacity of the characters to articulate and explain that the blurring together of the descriptive phrase into a single word denotes this as a clear, distinct, always the same event, but one that cannot be described. The term charges the reader with the sensation of experiencing the phenomenon in the moment, more so than a long, more detailed description could.

These moments, however, were limited in Lincoln in the Bardo, something I missed from = Saunders’s short fiction. The novel seemed to rely more on the larger creative structure—the fragmentation of the narrative between multiple voices, the examination of fiction and historical fact—than on smaller scale language creativity. In one moment, Elise Traynor says “I want ed so much to hold a dear Babe” and the “ed” is placed separate from the “want,” capturing a more complex sensation with a single verb: that her wanting was in the past (in her lifetime), but that her wanting is simultaneously ongoing and sustained in her present, which is timeless (the moment of her death being, to some extent, the end of time for her). I love this kind of move and wanted more of this.

The creative structural play between fiction and historical fact seems to be one of the most critical aspects of this book. I wondered repeatedly as I read whether the historical sources (and the text from them) was real or invented, until I ran across a text citation (Team of Rivals) that I was sure was real in the world. The historical words exhibit a certain “stranger than fiction” phenomenon in this book, as they convey with overwhelming specificity the intensity and humanism of Abraham Lincoln, a figure who seems too towering to be human. I kept marveling—How do we know so much? How do we know so much about Lincoln? This is almost horrifying—as if I’ve turned over a stone that should have been left unturned. How could all this information be real? Turns out, it’s not, quite. Ultimately, I had to Google this and discovered that many of the quotes are real, some invented, further blurring the line between truth and fiction. There is misinformation, poor memory, and limited observation in every human account. Saunders plays with this, showing where the historical narratives contradict each other. But he also shows the power of evidential agreement—as the narratives align, we see how much we know to be true about the Lincolns, about Abe and Willie.

Saunders gives his clearly invented narratives—the voices of Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, Reverend Everly Thomas, and company—the same weight as the narratives of real people, as the analysis of historians. Is this intentionally subversive? Is this an examination of the blending of life into narrative and narrative into real life? This story repeatedly shows how these ghosts hold onto the bardo because of the narratives they tell about their lives. They have to repeat why they’ll go back, what they need to do differently. Hans Vollman maintains self-deception through language choices—the unspeakable word “coffin” becomes “sick-box” and the unspeakable “corpse” becomes “sick-form.” Language and narrative operate as both tools of disguise and deception, and as tools of truth and fact, in the novel.

As a whole, Lincoln in the Bardo is haunting, emotional, compelling, memorable, and strange—difficult to digest and compartmentalize.

#george saunders #lincoln in the bardo #reading matters

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