Sunday, March 17, 2024

Virginia, 1629: An incident in intersex & trans history

In 1623 — as Kit Heyam writes in Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender — Warraskoyack, Virginia, "an English colonial settlement, on Powhatan land," had a population of "twenty-nine white and four Black people." This included a person named Thomas Hall, who worked as a servant to two men. Hall's story was that they had grown up as a girl in England, then dressed as a young man to fight on the Île de Ré in the 1620s, then resumed employment as a woman in needlework for a few years before sailing for America in 1627.

The small community in Warraskoyack had differing opinions of Hall's gender, which seems not to have been a problem for about a year, but in early 1629 became the subject of debate and investigation when Hall was said to be having sex with a person known as "great Bess," who was a maid to a plantation manager. Hall also wore women's clothing and claimed to like sex with men too.

Heyam writes that, in 1629, "around one third of the Warraskoyack population had directly involved themselves in the task of establishing whether the person they knew as Thomas was 'man or woman'." Hall, when asked directly, asserted that they were both. One of Hall's employers likewise answered that he believed Hall to be both. The community then "sought to prove the 'truth' of Thomas(ine)'s gender by inspecting their genitals repeatedly and violently." No one agreed whether Hall's genitals were male or female, and "the case was passed to the Jamestown court," which decided that Hall should be treated as both "a man and a woman."

person walking in old-style women's dress

Heyam points out that "intersex bodies have always been made to stand for more than they are: for God's judgement, for hte supernatural or monstrous, for threats to the patriarchal order. People whose intersex traits are obvious have rarely been able to fly under the radar. While trans history is often hidden behind ambiguous motivations for gender-nonconforming behaviour, intersex history is often violently laid bare before an invasive medical, religious or literary gaze." Unfortunately, some "trans people have appropriated intersex traits and identities to validate our genders or access medical treatment." Nonetheless there are some similarities between trans and intersex experience, including that "medical and legal professionals" try to interfere and to change trans and intersex people's bodies against their wishes. "The same doctors who were keen to change intersex bodies, which they saw as in need of 'correction', were reluctant to help trans people, whose problems they understood as psychological, not physical." Some people therefore asserted that they were intersex because it was a way for them to seek hormones and surgeries.

The life of Thomas Hall can be seen as part of intersex history, trans history, or both.

Please do check out the book Before We Were Trans because it is full of insightful ideas like this.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Measurements and categories

On the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905). Philosophy of nature can discuss

"the need for a hybrid vision of environments that does not separate what is 'natural' from what is 'human,' and that abandons environmental determinism by focusing on the complex interactions in which spatial frameworks are not simply a context, but fully-fledged actors in the history—one that is essentially an environmental history and cannot be separated, as Reclus would have said, from geography. With regard to ethics, the fact that human beings are part of nature also limits their pretentions to domination over it."
Federico Ferretti (translated by Arby Gharibian) « Élisée Reclus: A Philosophy of Nature », Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe [online], ISSN 2677-6588, published on 22/Jun/2020, consulted on 09/Aug/2023.

"When we ask what makes something a sandwich we should also ask why we need to know, and who we are. The "we" is a culturally specific we. The type of handheld that is a sandwich has a lineage and it is a cultural one. That cultural lineage informs the conditions under which it can be used, so in that way informs its function. Then the question is why we are asking the question. Why do we want to know? What hinges on the answer? That is going to guide us in making our question more precise. What is our purpose?"
— Ásta, Professor of Philosophy, Duke University, quoted in Notable Sandwiches #89: Hot Dog, Talia Lavin, The Sword and the Sandwich, March 15, 2024

"Beginning in the late 18th century, 'Is X a Y' was asked about entire categories of human beings who had previously been excluded from the category of rational political actors (Jews, women, people of color, etc.), and the world we now live in was shaped by the destabilisation that question produced in the minds of the people who asked it; in many ways we are still suffering from the after effects."
Alana Vincent, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Umeå University, Sweden, also quoted by Talia Lavin in the same post

books stacked in a spiral

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

History: Denim jeans for workers, not 'men' or 'women'

waist and hips in jeans - seems female
Jeans by Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

Denim jeans are for workers:

"Women had begun wearing pants — specifically, denim jeans — because they were granted practical permission in industrial factory work during World War II. Women had not earned 'the right to wear pants' as a symbolic legal right, or as a matter of formal equality. The police had simply chosen, for obvious reasons, not to arrest them for wearing pants to and from work. Their pants were tied to their work, to the class status of being a worker in the formal labor market and the public sphere."

— "The Left Hand of the Law": Anti-Drag Law's Policing Ought to Inform Political Responses, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 27, 2023

Later, jeans are not explicitly men's clothing, but not necessarily women's clothing either:

“Those who do not want to change their anatomy but do want to change their gender behavior fare less well in establishing their social identity. The women Holly Devor called ‘gender blenders’ wore their hair short, dressed in unisex pants, shirts, and comfortable shoes, and did not wear jewelry or makeup. They described their everyday dress as women’s clothing: One said, ‘I wore jeans all the time, but I didn’t wear men’s clothes’ (Devor 1989, 100). Their gender identity as women, but because they refused to ‘do femininity,’ they were constantly taken for men (1987, 1989, 107-42). Devor said of them: ‘The most common area of complaint was with public washrooms. They repeatedly spoke of the humiliation of being challenged or ejected from women’s washrooms. Similarly, they found public change rooms to be dangerous territory and the buying of undergarments to be a difficult feat to accomplish’ (1987, 29). In an ultimate ironic twist, some f these women said ‘they would feel like transvestites if they were to wear dresses, and two women said that they had been called transvestites when they had done so’ (1987, 31). They resolved the ambiguity of their gender status by identifying as women in private and passing as men in public to avoid harassment on the street, to get men’s jobs, and, if they were lesbians, to make it easier to display affection publicly with their lovers (Devor 1989, 107–42). Sometimes they even used men’s bathrooms. When they had gender-neutral names, like Leslie, they could avoid the bureaucratic hassles that arose when they had to present their passports or other proof of identity, but because most had names associated with women, their appearance and their cards of identity were not conventionally congruent, and their gender status was in constant jeopardy. When they could, they found it easier to pass as men than to try to change the stereotyped notions of what women should look like.”
Judith Lorber. Paradoxes of Gender. Yale University, 1994. Chapter: “‘Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender” (PDF). p. 21.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

On Jewish values: 'Alfred Kazin's Journals'

Today's email from the New York Review of Books shares an old article, "The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin," by Edward Mendelson (Aug 18, 2011). The email teases it:

“‘Values are our only home in the universe,’ Kazin wrote in 1962 at the height of his public success, and the more intensely he thought about values, the more intensely he thought about himself as a Jew. ‘For what is it I draw my basic values from if not from the Jews!’ His journals explore a radical, idiosyncratic Judaism informed by the same nonconformist moral passion that drove William Blake’s radical, idiosyncratic Christianity.”

The Book

Alfred Kazin's Journals: Edited by Richard M. Cook. Yale University Press, 2011.

Alfred Kazin's Journals book cover showing an elevated train

Publisher's description:

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.

To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.

Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

Spotted Kazin here too:

"White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes."

Memory Failure Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Another reflection on Jewish values

Isaac Deutscher identified with the oppressed. Supporting people who are oppressed is what he saw as the important meaning of being Jewish.

"Polish Jewish intellectual Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) insisted," as Rebecca Ruth Gould explains, "that his identity obliged him to adhere to a certain kind of partiality. In Deutscher’s own words: “I am … a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.” Deutscher’s partiality was against racism, and ultimately against Zionism."

As I see it, "solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated" doesn't mean agreeing with anything and everything that person says about any topic whatsoever; it means having solidarity vis-a-vis their oppression and their right to exist and to get free from their oppression. The meaning of solidarity that is "unconditional" is, I think, that we don't impose additional conditions on our solidarity. They do not have to sing and dance for us to earn our solidarity for getting free. They do not have to bribe us. They do not have to work for us. The fact that they are oppressed is in itself a reason — the only reason — for us to have solidarity with them in their fight against oppression.

This is aligned with "what [Indian philosopher Akeel] Bilgrami calls ‘wilful imbalance’," meaning that you intentionally take sides. Your view is not from nowhere. You have a standpoint, and you choose the side you want to take.

Gould concludes her essay: "Justifications of free speech that rely on the liberal emphasis on balance obscure what it really means to silence another person’s voice. To silence is to deny, through the language of moderation and balance, their very right to exist. To respect free speech is to respect life itself."

As I understand it: If there's a debate over maybe these people should be allowed to exist and be free, or maybe they shouldn't? that debate doesn't embody freedom for the people who's lives are at stake, because one of the options being considered is that they shouldn't be free (or that they shouldn't exist at all, which is tightly linked to the idea that they shouldn't be free — those are overlapping concepts). This raises the question of, when we say "free speech," for whom is the speech free? For the person who's running their mouth, perhaps freedom means their right to speak any words it occurs to them to say or that pass through their lips with varying degrees of intentionality. But whether the speech promotes freedom is another question entirely, and it matters for the person who's being talked about. Free speech that undermines the conditions of freedom is a kind of paradox. Should the person being talked about cease to be free, or even cease to exist, in what sense will the speaker continue to have "freedom of speech" to talk about them?

"Against Balance: Why Free Speech Cannot and Should not be Neutral," Rebecca Ruth Gould, Dialogue & Discourse (Medium), Feb 25, 2024

Citing The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essaysby Isaac Deutscher (Verso, 2017).

book cover for The Non-Jewish Jew

Sunday, February 18, 2024

On the portal: Midlife transition

A reference to "the portal" drew my attention. Yes, the midlife transition is like a portal. I read:

glowing circle

"Are You In the Portal?" It's a crisis, but it's an awakening. Anne Helen Petersen. Culture Study (Substack). Oct 22, 2023.

Petersen's mother said to her one day:

"'What are you now, 42?...I think that’s exactly when I started writing textbooks. I just had this huge creative surge.'

What an amazing way to reframe the energy I’ve been channeling this last year: energy to write another book, energy to figure out a Culture Study-related podcast, energy to dahlia farm. What if it wasn’t ambition pushing me forward….but a swell of creativity? And what if that swell of creativity was possible because I’ve become a whole lot less concerned with bullshit?"

Petersen read how Anja Tyson referred to "the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in." Then, Petersen says: "I became obsessed with this idea of a portal, and when I brought it up — on IG, but also in casual conversation — it seemed to resonate. Something was happening. Maiden-becomes-crone, sure. Destabilizing, yes. But it was also an experience of transformation, of refinement."

She spoke to Satya Byock, "a Jungian psychotherapist who specializes in younger patients going through transitions" and author of the book Quarterlife, who sees that, "within a Jungian framework, there’s a midlife passage," and "the experience is more intense if you’ve been heads-down — absorbed by parenting, by your career, by an illness, by something — for some time."

She also spoke to Claire Zulkey, author of the Evil Witches newsletter. "'Part of me thinks that I’ve gone through the portal,' she told me, 'but the part of me that’s paranoid and wise thinks: oh bitch you haven’t even begun to portal.'" If you're privileged to do so, you can redesign your life so you have more time for parenting, yet still, "it’s half boredom, half gratitude."

(I have felt that way about redesigning my life for an office career.)

Career coach Keren Eldad had her own experience at 36. It's just that something "sets you off the edge," as Eldad puts it. "It can be stagnation around your career, it can be kids going to elementary school or even college. It can be around physical changes..." Once you're set off, you're in an ongoing process of letting go of the past. What you feel about yourself and your life might be separate from what you feel about the new work you're doing. Eldad says: "Like, I am personally done, but this is not done. And that, you feel invigorated by. If you’re grieving what you’ve left behind, let yourself feel it. What you’re doing is gathering your strength, and there will be a point when the grieving ends."

Petersen concludes:

"There’s nothing magical about the portal. It can be painful and discombobulating and, as Claire Zulkey points out, sweaty. There’s certainly no guaranteed joy on the other end. I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to experience it or to understand its shape in your life. I don’t even think it’s gendered...It’s just a period of transition. You can lean into it, you can ignore it, you can understand it as a crisis or a transformation."

You should read her essay "Are You In the Portal?" for more of this.

Questions to guide a planned transition

Osi I. wrote:

"Here are a few points I reflected upon as I prepared to take my leaps. They might be helpful as you consider yours:

  1. How important is it to take such a step? Will it change my life for the better?
  2. What are the barriers, if any, to taking the leap? How can they be addressed, mitigated, overcome?
  3. Can I just step out on faith to do what I know my spirit is calling me to do?
  4. Will taking this leap add value/joy/peace/fulfillment to my life?
  5. Will this leap help me and mine grow in unimaginable ways?
  6. Will this leap save my life?
  7. If I don’t take this leap, what will it cost me?"

— "I Left My 6 figure Job to Save My Life," Feb 25, 2024

I wrote of my midlife transition

Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Three waves of opposition to transgender bodies

G. Samantha Rosenthal is a scholar of transgender history.

Here's a recent article:

Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People: Three major waves of opposition to transgender health care in the past century have cited faulty science to justify hostility. G. Samantha Rosenthal & The Conversation US. Scientific American. February 12, 2024.

statue of two people grappling

Rosenthal argues that there have been "three waves of opposition to transgender health care". I organized this blog post based on them.

Wave 1: Nazi Germany

Rosenthal writes: "In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe."

One important beginning in modern trans history: "In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice" just as "the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness." Following an "Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms," some scientists "developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences." Everyone was classifying queer/trans people, but some wanted to do so for political liberation and others for genocide.

Gender-affirming care has existed in the United States since the 1940s. Rosenthal says: "Puberty blockers, hormone therapies and anatomical surgeries are neither experimental nor untested and have been safely administered to cisgender, transgender and intersex adults and children for decades," and opposition to this "has historically been rooted in pseudoscience."

Learn more

This history is known. Historians can ask questions:

“So who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Were they the ambisexual performance freaks whose audacious and aggressive sexuality and playful confusion of gender norms triggered an entire society into fascism, as though the Nazis were an allergic reaction? Or were they people like Ernst Röhm, whose worship of masculine vitality… and who followed that impulse towards lifting fascists to power? Were they people like Friedrich Radszuweit, cautious and apolitical men who decided to stand back and stand by while fascism gained steam? Were they people like Hirschfeld, complicated and ambivalent men with deep reservoirs of idealism, knowledge, and compassion who were limited by their blind spots, shaped by and shaping racist and eugenic discourses, and often willing to accept rights for some at the expense of others?”

— Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. London: Verso, 2022.

In late 2022, for the first time, "a court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted in Nazi Germany." — New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People, Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation, September 21, 2023.

This result followed 20 years of activism. In January 2023, the German parliament "dedicated the [annual Holocaust] remembrance to those killed by Nazis because of their gender identity and sexual orientation. The body also acknowledged decades of post-World War II persecution against LGBTQ+ people in Germany." — The Advocate

For more information about the colonial-era and industrial-era construction of "homosexuality," please read "There Were Gay Nazis". It's a 7-minute read on Medium.

Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres
Blu Buchanan
GLQ (2022) 28 (4): 489–513.
October 1, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9991299
The author said on Twitter: "This was YEARS in the making, and I hope it’s a valuable launching point for future scholar-organizers."
It's rentable from Duke University Press for $15 for 48 hours.

Wave 2: 1970s

Rosenthal writes: "In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, transgender medicine bounced back in the U.S. Scientists and clinicians at several universities began experimenting with new hormonal and surgical interventions. In 1966, Johns Hopkins became the first university hospital in the world to offer trans health care.

By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights."

Rosenthal continues: A 1979 study by Meyer and Reter was "homophobic and classist in design" insofar as it defined the success of gender transitions by whether the people had "straight marriages and...gender-appropriate jobs." So: "The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry."

Wave 3: Post-Covid

Rosenthal writes: "And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave."

See my article: 2024 anti-transgender initiatives in the US

Similarly, Chase Strangio: "Though contemporary political assaults on trans lives began in 2016, it was only in 2019 that the right found a fruitful opening for attack: Since 2020, 24 states have passed bills barring trans kids from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities." ("Trans Visibility Is Nice. Safety Is Even Better," New York Times, Feb. 15, 2024)

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

On systems thinking

Systems thinking is non-hierarchical and undermines supremacist thinking.

opening in fence by ocean

On 'systems thinking'

A few days ago on Bluesky, Dr. Elizabeth Sawin says it's "revolutionary/radical thinking" (Bluesky)

there aren't lines in the world, just in our minds"
good: "curiosity about borders and boundaries"
dangerous: "treating made-up boundaries as real" (Bluesky)

"events unfold in multistep (sometimes circular, sometimes branching) chains of causation" (Bluesky)

She recommends this book: Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows

Right vs. wrong

People like to perceive a Team A vs. Team B conflict and propose which side they'd be on or (as a spectator) hope will win. However, such an imagined "conflict" may not the best way of understanding what's going on. Maybe there's a place for A and B to both exist in the world and to exist in some kind of creative tension or mutual support. Jumping to right vs. wrong eliminates possibilities.

Tessa Koumoundouros shares an example of a failure of systems thinking: Instead of acknowledging "complex ecosystem interactions," we reduce it to a problem of "horses vs wildlife that can be fenced (it can't) to argue for an emotionaly charged 'ethical decision', at expense of the entire system" (Bluesky) The context is this article: "Rethinking the mantra of biodiversity: Why the past should not determine the future." Pablo Castelló and Francisco Santiago-Ávila. ABC Australia. Feb 8, 2024.

Ecological crisis

The tendency toward atomistic thinking, where you can focus on a discrete person or thing as well as on some direct cause-and-effect chain centering on that same originally perceived person or thing (whose identity is not transformed by the process), and individualistic thinking (selfishness), is a reason why people don't productively discuss or sustainably enact our relationships to natural systems.

Gender

"Gender" means "category." To understand someone's gender, we can look at them not only as individuals, and not only as how they individually fit (or don't fit) into the category, but at their relationships with others and how everyone's characteristics and category membership are always in flux. That would be systems thinking.

Another suggestion

See also: Systems 1: An Introduction to Systems Thinking by Draper Kauffman and Morgan Kauffman

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Writing complex topics that feel accessible

light bulb glowing

On the "single stark element" that's with you all along in your narrative, something that "underpins the whole thing," Charlie Jane Anders says today:

"I have a feeling my stuff errs on the side of 'deceptively complicated.' I write things that have a million things whizzing around, but they boil down to one or two simple ideas. Or at least, I hope that there’s one or two main ideas when you look past all the fancy whizzbangery on the surface, or else you are left with just a mickle of a muddle. Right?

* * *

But if something is deceptively complex, how do you keep it from becoming just straight-up overcomplicated and messy? I wish there was a magic bullet – but I think part of it is that if you want to be able to strip away all the layers of complexity and find something stark underneath it all – a single stark element – then that needs to be there the whole time. You have to have one idea that you keep coming back that underpins the whole thing."
— Charlie Jane Anders, "The Difference Between Deceptively Simple and Deceptively Complex," Buttondown, January 10, 2024

Her book on writing:

But what makes it serious?

Be your theme simple, complex, or somewhere in the middle like "deceptively complex," what makes it serious?

Sometimes you have to write it to find out and let the reader decide.

An affirmation: My essay theme "may seem silly" and "probably is silly, which is a shame, considering that I’ve got this whole essay about it now." ("This is What Makes Us Girls: On the Lana-Del-Rey-to-Red-Scare Pipeline." Jude Doyle (on Ghost). 11 Jan 2024.)

Ask lots of questions

Ask questions, e.g.,:

  • "What words would you use to describe the most important values held by people in your culture?"
  • "Who taught you those values? Why are they important to you?"

And so on.

Those two questions, and a few more, are from "50 Possible Questions to Open Israeli-Palestinian Dialogues," Kenneth Cloke, Mediate.com, January 26, 2024

Ask one big question

"The personal essay can be about almost anything," Aimee Liu writes, but is "rooted in a central question." The writer writes themself into the frame as the person who is raising the question, a recognition that is central to what makes it a personal essay. It doesn't matter so much if the question is answered. The personal essay "doesn’t necessarily seek to make sense out of life experiences; rather, these essays tend to let go of that sense-making impulse to do something else, like nose around a bit in the wondering, uncertain space that lies between experience and the need to explain or organize it in a logical manner."

This is from "Picture Your Structure" in her Legacy & Lore (Substack, February 16, 2024):

"Like a memorist, an essayist always writes two essays simultaneously, overlapped as transparencies, one exploring what Vivian Gornick calls the situation, the other what she terms the story. Poet Richard Hugo talks about a piece’s 'triggering subject' and its generated, or real, subject. Phillip Lopate describes the 'double perspective' that an essayist needs, the ability to both dramatize and to reflect. I’ve always talked to my writing students about the narrow subject and the larger subject."

There's no one model to explain all of human psychology

Paul Tournier explained in The Violence Within that there are “schools of scientific psychology” that “set up a doctrinaire model into which they attempt to fit the whole of human behaviour in terms of a few relatively simple mechanisms — projection and introjection, identification and differentiation, unconscious repression and liberation of complexes, drives and resistances…” While these may contain insights that are “true and valuable,” Tournier says that when we give too much weight to them (exactly “in the very fact of their being elevated into systems”) we risk “the infinite diversity of life and of the mind,” and we may forget that “the essential problems are not about mechanisms, but about values, not about functions but about the person, problems which cannot ever be reduced to an inventory of functions. Literary psychology cannot be learnt—it is too rich, too varied, too subtle, because it never allows itself to be reduced to any sort of model. It may be looked at as one might contemplate a big bunch of wild flowers…the bouquet as a whole does not deliver up the secret of its harmonious unity.”
Paul Tournier. The Violence Within. Translated by Edwin Hudson, 1978. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, (originally Violence et Puissance, 1977) pp. 64–65.

People have feelings about what they do

"I can’t think of a way for a character — fictional or otherwise — to pull off a convincing redemption story without experiencing and expressing true remorse ... feeling remorse is a valuable and cathartic experience that empowers change. Whether personal responsibility is an illusion or not, feeling responsible and taking action to change our behavior, is a powerful thing."
— Steven Toews, How to Write a Convincing Redemption Story, The Writing Cooperative, Feb 8, 2024

Pick a compelling title

Michael Gallant gives some tips in How to Write a Book Title That Gets Attention, BookBaby, January 11, 2024:

  • "Be clear and concise."
  • "Use strong, evocative language."
  • "Be original and unique."
  • "Make sure your title is relevant to your book’s content."

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Brian Evenson: 'Denarration....you're told something and then it's removed'

The Horror Is What We Don’t Yet Know (and Maybe Never Will): Brian Evenson Interviewed by Rob Goyanes, BOMB Magazine, Jun 25, 2019

statue of two people grappling. the statues are flat and have holes like swiss cheese so light passes through

One of his books is "Last Days, about an amputee cult who captures an unwitting messiah."

From the interview:

RG
You use repetition, in terms of wording and syntax, to create an unsettling effect. What other devices do you consciously employ to produce this?

BE
Most of my work in revision is about sound and rhythm, trying to figure out what is going to really serve the story. I'm working with those things to try to manipulate the reader. A lot of my work uses a process of “denarration”, by which I mean it presents something, narrates it as if it’s real, then it takes it away. A lot of things are qualified or taken away or compromised, or you're told something and then it's removed. That is a big part of the unsettling effect, of destabilizing the story’s world.

Evenson continues:

"So much fiction has this idea: there's a character, they confront something, they change, and then they're different people. If you're around humans for long enough, you realize that that's the exception rather than the rule. It so rarely happens that people actually change in a meaningful way. I've always been a little skeptical of character development, but then what do you do with fiction? My sense is that maybe it’s about conveying mental states and changing the reader. That, to me, is more important than conveying some kind of change in a character in a world that doesn't look like our world."

This reminds me of what William Maxwell enjoyed in novels (1955)

William Maxwell, in a 1955 speech at Smith College, said: "These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it." (see: The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine. Reprinted in LitHub, January 24, 2024.)

The reader stays to find out whether "there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had." The characters don't know something because "they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you." You're introduced to a character, and "you have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands..." Or: "A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in." Or the narrator "has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront." Or the writer gives special voice, attitude: "A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s." And "the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up." Trust: "If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. ...you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)" As in "the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. ... As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end." Timing: "a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos."

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Saturday, December 30, 2023

The structure of time in stories

"Whereas a film has 24 frames per second in which to tell its story, a traditional comic book only has a small number of frames, or panels, per page, usually between five and nine, across a total of 22 pages. Comparatively, a comic book is equivalent to about six seconds of film. But obviously, any comic contains more narrative than the time it takes to read this sentence. So where, then, does the content 'hide'?"
— Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, McFarland & Company, 2021.

“I need a meta-time, a thing fueled by the kind of heartbeat I desire — one that is rule-breaking, empathetic, aware of its power enough to offer some kind of mercy.
In DC Comics, there is a concept called hypertime, an in-universe framework formulated as a diagram, making the timelines of stories accurate, even without continuity across existing collections of storylines. The idea postulates a kind of multiversal transit map where each line, representing its own story, runs parallel, crosses over others, and carries on, with characters hopping from one train to another across universes. A reader in the third-dimensional space can look down and make meaning of the stories between the pages, leaving room for the possibility of a fourth-dimensional, hyper-cubic reader who examines that space, a geometric vision incorporating our universe along with the comic story world."
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 60.

dead sea scroll, original

"...pretty much all of my favorite books screw around with the order of events, or come shaped like puzzle boxes, or have seven separate 'third acts.' Like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun, which jump around in time, or Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which intersperses two timelines that slowly converge.
Time is the one drug that absolutely everyone is hooked on. And fiction is the only place to get a really potent hit."
— Charlie Jane Anders. Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. Tordotcom, 2021. Chapter 24.

"Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost."
Charles Yu. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Pantheon, 2010. p. 14.

"This experiencing of time, it seems to me, is what sets writing apart and makes it more than simply words, more valuable than a commodity, more pleasurable than the audio-visual product which digital culture has converted into a space of hollowed time, like the time you spend flying between two airports. Writing is time packed full. It derives its morality from its immorality; it achieves compassion, not by flattery or glib misrepresentation, but with a gaze that is concerned only with seeing what is there, uncompromisingly, avoiding all fakery. This, then, is what it means to search for the truth: the objective that attends me whenever I ask myself, in an ironic spirit, Why do you write? or, What does writing mean to you?"
I write like a lover, I write like one dead. The opening essay of my second Mutanabbi book, translated by Robin Moger. Youssef Rakha. Language of Loss (Substack). Dec. 31, 2022.

"Linear history, Oedipal history, is our fantasy, and to perpetuate it we invented the myth of an authoritarianism arising from the preterit, even though authority can only be exercised from the present. Borges, whose work was concerned with the manipulation of time, claimed that each author invents his precursors. Or, to put it in Phillip K. Dick’s terms, the Oedipal structure is a Counter-ClockWorld, a world where, as in this Dick novel, the libraries destroy books and the dead emerge from their graves.The best-kept secret of linear oxidental time is that it is written from the future to the past."
Heriberto Yépez. The Empire of Neomemory. Translated by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, & Brian Whitener. ChainLinks, 2013. Originally: El Imperio de la neomemoria (Oaxaca: Almadía, 2007). Part I: America, Pseudo-Patriarchy, Pantopia.

“Any sequence of events is interesting because of its positive and negative shapes. Take a pair of scissors and cut something out. Anything. Why not a devil with horns and a tail and cloven hooves. So. There is your paper with a devil-shaped hole in it. Two devil-shapes, one positive, one negative, and both of them made at the very same moment. Was the Battle of Manzikert the shape of the paper or the shape of the hole? It’s as I’ve said before: there is always a twoness in the oneness, and for this reason it’s almost impossible to know what is happening in the space-time configuration. Not only that: as soon as an effort is made to look at any particular thing the aspect of that thing becomes other than what it was—that event that happened in full view when unlooked-at covers itself when observed, spins around itself one of those wonderful encrusted eggs with a peephole in one end of it; I the observer, receding reactively from the gaze that proceeds from my eyes, find myself shot into the distance thousands of miles away from the peephole. Inch by inch I think my way back; closer, closer, closer I come and here it is all tiny—the tiny, tiny Battle of Manzikert.”
— Russell Hoban. Pilgermann. London: Bloomsbury, 1983.

"If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were."
— John McPhee, in an essay on structure in the New Yorker (January 6, 2013), quoted by Aimee Liu in "Picture Your Structure," Legacy & Lore (Substack), February 16, 2024.