I don’t want to half-ass this one, though I might out of necessity–my head is cramped with the pressures of managing normal routines, and I’m pretty bad at setting as much time to think and write aside as I want to. I started a new job three months ago– which involves navigating all over and battling calendars, which are my natural enemy, but also involves doing library service for both children and prisoners, which I enjoy.

All three of the books I want to talk about in this are great science fiction books. They are, to quote a Strange Horizons review of Ninefox Gambit, “a novel that throws you into its world without any preparation, trusting that, even if you don’t understand everything, you’ll be able to survive it.” This use of language to paint new pictures is what sci-fi, like poetry, is for. I have been trying to innoculate myself against hopelessness; sci-fi is what I use. By combining new words, I always hope we can get to a new idea.

I am working (one day a week) doing library service at a building on Rikers Island, and science fiction is one of the popular genres there; it’s one of my favorite genres too. So for each of these books, I read them because 1) I had been meaning to for who knows how long and 2) several guys on Rikers requested each of them and I picked them up to stock them in a backpack and found them too interesting to put down. Two, Ninefox Gambit and Ancillary Justice, were the first books of trilogies about destroying big space empires…but so slowly, by so few people, that they feel like imperial-strength propaganda in spite of themselves (disclaimer: I have not yet read the latter books in the series). I also read Imago, the last in a trilogy about a non-hierarchical alien race taking over Earth for the good of humanity and changing humans so they would no longer destroy one another. It was interesting to dance back and forward a little bit with 1990s doom-optimism and then back to today’s space-opera hits. Both Lee and Leckie have flashier accoutrements than Butler and both of them have a lot of sparkly big universes, full of people who find it difficult to understand each other despite being basically the same species (though Leckie has one major imperial competitor for the human empire, where Lee’s universe seems to only have ever had earthlings in it.)

In the years just before Trump’s first term as American President, Lee and Leckie were duelling with the idea of immortal, all-powerful AI emperors whose aggregation of data and military capability is menacing a galaxy by way of military takeover, mass slaughter and genocide; in each of their respective series, they imagined that what would be necessary to take on such a figure was a rebel soldier moved to revolt by the regime’s slaughter of their own loved ones. Butler’s Imago is meanwhile about the future after the collapse of human empires–about a DNA-mining, Earth-stripping takeover by aliens more powerful than ourselves. Imago operates in a kind of trance-dream where even post-state, post-capital humans are inherently, biologically fucked. In this dream, seductive aliens have both a need for peace/life and a deep knowledge of humanity which motivates them to change us. I love how much the aliens need us in this fantasy– to continue their own drifting meander through space, they must assimilate new species, changeling-like, into their midst, a Ship of Theseus forever pollinating and transforming. In Butler, we cannot resist our successors or their use of our history for their own ends; it is the dream of being washed safely forward onto shore, carried by fairies. I think of the turtles in Lathe of Heaven; the Oonkali are the same in terms of having an orientation toward merging, connecting and becoming one, but Butler keeps the edge on the human horror of it even as she leans into desire, and what I enjoy about her is that the human reader is left ambivalent about her lovely star-creatures. Xenogenesis is a dream of rescue after failure, a dream of alternative being, and a dream of the end of humanity which takes it for granted, which preserves a hippy dreaminess with an undergirding of Soviet-collapse grittiness about suffering and death, plus uncomfortable weird eugenic overtones. I love the third-gender wound-healing pro-alien narrators with tentacles and yummy bio-drives who are on their own terms straightforward and guileless. The reader is then left with an uncomfortable feeling about the inevitable end they face in their own world, sans alien, by doing nothing. The thing about Butler’s narrator is that she succeeds in making you see the idiocy of human action alongside the passion, coercion and devotion of a new, alternative format for love and connection, one which can transcend all failures of communication. I find, in Imago, a forerunner of the 1990s Bruce Coville children’s science-fiction series My Teacher Is An Alien, the latter of which involves, like Butler, throuple mind-melding and lovely slimy, communisty, friendly, threatening aliens who are agog at what humanity can do to each other (negative).

Imago is from 1989; we thought that disintegration, then, was imminent. Its positive vision is that an external infusion might fix something wrong with humanity/that cooperation could mend violence, and that violence in itself might be averted forever, eventually, once people had suffered enough. Lee and Leckie’s narrators, meanwhile, are semi-human tools of violence in entirely human space-empires full of efficiencies, robots, and control who cast off their chains–barely, with much ambivalence and a lot of casualties– and become embroiled in two sets of two-man schemes to take down a political order all alone, thank you very much. In these space-worlds, there is no alternative to brutal force– even in the service of peace.

I live in an empire where people dream of political violence in the core, in revenge either for their own wounds from above or for the wounds their people inflict on others. Only some have the guns to do something about it, and mostly they act violence out on their social inferiors. Those with nobler dreams of wealth redistribution are too atomized to perform the necessary Berkmanesque procedures, even among gaggles of bohemians. If they did, we do know (O Luigi) how little it is likely to really do. Both Lee and Leckie’s series take place in worlds where individual political violence might do something, and, lacking any tools but hammers, the imperial superstructure itself appears to be a nail. All things, in these worlds, can be solved by space battles and assassinations; the average citizen is also so effectively repressed–for hundreds or thousands of years– that internal rebellion or conversation with rebels, or a rebellion against power on any but its own terms, is almost unthinkable to the imperial-core protagonist. Rebel guns are placed by the emperor herself. Both protagonists, in these books, are machine-controlled military instruments, for who else has guns? Lee’s woman officer is bound by mental conditioning to follow any order given to her by a superior within her organization, and Breq, who is genderless in Radchaai culture but gendered as a woman when outside it, is a literal AI embedded in a brainwashed enslaved (female?) body stolen from a conquered world. Both are, a little, like Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine), in that they have an external obedience drive which causes them to do things that sicken them consciously and unconsciously until they snap and rebel.

There’s a tricky contradiction in Lee and Leckies’ stories: despite constant brutal repression, rebellion foments constantly at the edge of empire, and is creeping toward the heart. Whenever you get the bigger picture, it is a wonder that the empire ever existed– there are so many people, in Leckie’s world, who hate it, and so many thousands of years of alternative theocratic systems in Lee’s world where space is governed by calendrical systems which keeps different places enmeshed. Leckie, I will say, does a slightly better job writing about the cultures at the empire’s periphery than Lee (in what is, to be fair, lee’s first book). Ninefox Gambit mentions pastries, prayer and farming, but the only world either protagonist seems to have any memory of is army life. Leckie shows you a few more pictures of local economies, food sources, art. The Ancillary series and the Machineries of Empire series feature major empires that spread across space (via portals or spidery spaceships) and which also have immortal emperors who occupy many bodies at once. Lee occasionally tries to play this for laughs, conjuring up little Douglas Adams-style asides about the scheming between the Skeksis-like heptarchate/hexarchate; Leckie’s humor, such as it is, mainly comes from banter between a junky ex-general and the AI former-spaceship who is saving her. The problem facing would-be revolutionaries in both sets of books is triple: how do you organize when everything you do can be effectively watched from above? How do you kill a being that has multiple bodies? How do you develop empathy sufficient for revolution or political programmes when you are taught obedience, compliance, and resignation to death? How can you trust an AI ghost to lead a revolution?

I read Yoon Ha Lee’s children’s fiction before I read his fiction for adults (I am a children’s librarian by training and former child). Lee was one of a number of trans creators to get swept under Rick Riordan’s imprint, which uses a symbol related to Percy Jackson to market other mythology/culturally specific fantasy fiction. It helps boost sales and market the books to kids, which is great, because I think Lee’s book Dragon Pearl and its sequel Tiger Honor are some of the most fantastic recent kids’ genre fiction–science fiction and fantasy, full of adventure, distinct worldbuilding, layered and malevolent adults, and a clear anti-imperial message with strong images (frontier casino in space, yay; planet full of pandemic ghosts: eek). It took me a while to worm my way back to his first novel, Ninefox Gambit; I had heard its Korean fantasy-sci-fi world-setting was similar to the Dragon Pearl books and to his “adult” (New Adult, I’d hedge) book Phoenix Extravagant. I liked Phoenix Extravagant and Dragon Pearl for Lee’s ferocious bouncy political earnestness alongside depictions of quite complicated characters and contingency, choice and possibility in every tragedy. Phoenix Extravagant shows an imperial occupation in a setting based on WWII Korea, where pigment made from destroyed local artifacts literally powers magical technology of occupation in the form of police-dragon-robots that can be used to kill or maim civilians. Extravagant’s plot involves a nonbinary artist initially becoming complicit in the empire and then splitting away from it to save the soul/autonomy of a rogue peacenik dragon-magic-robot. It was, simply, some feel-good fiction: sword lesbians, revolution, the coward redeemed by a loving beast. I love, actually, the contrast in protagonists between Dragon Pearl and Phoenix Extravagant; in Pearl, a brave, badass twelve-year-old runs away Mulan-style to prove her brother didn’t desert the army, disguising herself as a sixteen-year-old boy in a delightful pastiche of tomboy fantasy which starts in the realm of Tom Brown’s School Days and quickly becomes a challenge to the idea of military honor and an introduction to the horrors of war a la Goodbye To All That. In Extravagant, you discover again that you must turn against power, but as a washed-up adult. Have I said it’s fantastic too much?

In Ninefox Gambit, published a few years before Phoenix Extravagant, I saw a more cynical, uptight, frightened and repressed narrative voice endure all the way to the end of the book. The book is about waging constant war on enemies whose lives you disdain to respect but whose bodies’ destruction are your raison de’etre, your passion, purpose and vocation. When you change your target to your government, you do not necessarily gain respect for human life. The Kel’s campy military regiments are noted for committing suicide as a strategic maneuver, and are considered nude without gloves (just like the Radchaai in Leckie). The tense queerplatonic frenemy love between the bodiless undead immortal traitor Shuos Jedai and the corruptibly disillusioned young officer Cheris felt like the mind it was written by or for was one desperately struggling for light in a dim, airless place–the characters’ relationship is all thrashing, the snap and retightening of tension and longing in a setting where the whole goddamn ship is under so much constant pressure re: the fate of thousands of lives that it makes Discovery-era Starfleet look like a hedonist’s paradise. And the whole time, nobody is really trying to spare any civilians– even at the end. Starting from a place of being inured to violence, the violence just continues, with different cinematic devices; Lee tries to drive home that everyone has names and baby pictures once in a while (as do the robots who are effectively enslaved, like in Leckie), but when a weapon turns your soul to shards of glass, the humanity of side characters is rendered as so many sparkles. Lee’s horrible empire is so nastily conformist it really tests the bounds of my credibility– brainwashed brutal soldiers seem to be blowing up planets constantly, with little regard to life, in a way that can’t be economically sustainable for any kind of extraction surplus, and it only settles into place when you realize the book is showing you how much the system is cracking and the center cannot hold. Eerily, in this world– as in Brian Vaughn’s Saga– there is still soap-opera television drama, which military women might watch for a little rest in between sessions of trying to kill a bunch of rebels for having the wrong calendar.

Going back to my previous notes on AI; both Lee and Leckie, writing a decade ago, were imagining machines that could and would really think, and have their own agency, and war which would be designed not to have a “human” cost but which would in fact have both human and inhuman tolls, in the format of new intelligences–and also could preserve, read, record and analyze human minds such that the stamp of a personality might be transferred from body to body. Cory Doctorow was also playing with these dreams. In 2026, we have the robots, but not the rebellious sci-fi soul (to paraphrase the Chicks, we have Junior but we don’t have Hank). We are shambolic, but well-armed, and our drones can make choices based on our values about who to kill, without a single soldier needing to take on the individulal psychic weight of pushing a button for children’s deaths. Now we have a lot of chatbots which can inform, misinform, code, sort spreadsheets and act as jet fuel for an industrial boom in certain rare earth metals, but they are, at least as of this moment, not being utilized for revolution. Hackers are shutting down water and power systems to benefit specific anti-imperial fights for causes which may or may not be in their own ends noble. But the android-sheep world really isn’t here, and instead, what surrounds us are human bodies, being used as tools to churn out chips for engines that will incinerate us.

Butler knew that humans can hurt each other and other things too, and that in the end, after our power sources dry up, all we will have is the human.

Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (2024) and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000) are, despite being written a quarter-century apart and sitting in totally different genres, interestingly rhymey with one another. I mean, ultimately, I read them in the last couple weeks because I like books about food and sex, so I am the one making the rhyme. Even moreso, I like reading people’s thoughts on how the way we experience food and sex depends on economic/political machinations even as food/sex transport us toward an eminently un-commodifiable depth of feeling.

I reread Bourdain because a guy on Rikers wanted books on running restaurants, and in addition to a handful of books on food truck business planning and small business licensing, I was trying to see if Bourdain might have something that could still help an aspiring restaurateur today. I read it on the bus in two sittings; the guy I brought it for didn’t check it out, but another guy did and loved it. Kitchen Confidential is famous–and so is Bourdain, RIP– for exposing the mobsteryness, masculinity, corner-cuttings, and sexy homoerotic frisson within the commercial kitchen of 70s-2000s New York while also talking devotedly, with the mad passion of the depraved, of food. I am interested in the myth of Bourdain and how he somehow seems to have transcended the toxic masculinity, the jizz of problematicism, that sticks to so many of his cultural parallels.

Part of it is he has decent politics in the years before his death. His Kill-Kissinger quote is oft-cited. Based on what I know, he broadly seems to have been an honest, straightforward person to work for and with, if one that maintains a certain straight-boy-theater-kid overzealous practiced machismo which deprecates itself even as it puffs its muscles. He is pretty hardcore Man’s Man in many of his earlier writings and TV spots, in a way that gives the impression he thinks this is against-the-grain, but over the years featured and talked to a lot of women chefs. During #MeToo’s brief, public moment of reckoning (where, it must be said, a lot of famous men began looking a little panicked), he reflected publicly that he had not been a person to whom women felt comfortable confiding their stories of workplace misogyny, and pledged to do better calling toxic bro chefs “meatheads”. He supported his partner Asia Argento in her personal accusation of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein, and he’s always vocally supported gay people (many public statements made around gay marriage, citing lgbt rights laws as he travels, etc).

I developed a habit of comfort-watching Parts Unknown and No Reservations over the last few years, and it’s genuinely good entertainment, capturing the dawn of foody-ism in America and persuading the viewer that gastronomical craft and travel could be an engine of, say, world peace. It is also, not so subtly, anti-vegetarian propaganda, with plenty of appreciative exceptions for ~ethnic vegetarian food. What he promises is that genuine connection comes from understanding people on their own terms, and proving that whatever you think you know about food, someone else is cooking better in a place that you, American viewer, did not know about. The episode Bourdain made in Lebanon in 2006 as Israel began its attacks on Beirut, and his follow-up in 2010 where he visits a multi-ethnic pop-up restaurant serving delicious food alongside street food, local wineries, Hezbollah tchotchke shops, and more, does serve to humanize the Lebanese for Americans beyond what we get in our soulless propaganda tabloids; his suave, interested, genuine manner with locals in Dubai, India, Thailand etc makes it clear that he is interested in the why of people’s lives and ins and outs of food preparation, even as he also delivers tinned lines about being brave/foolhardy for eating (X ethnic food prepared on a street corner). It’s polished, narrativized, and a little sanitized, but it reads as a genuine creative project geared toward intercultural communication. There are, simultaneously, episodes of No Reservations where you see his part in crumbling the cookie, so to speak, as it has crumbled: for instance, his fawning visit to Portland/Seattle, where he hypes coffee shops, exclaims over the weirdness of the heavily tattooed foodies, all but sucks the dick of washed up punk-turned-bistro-owners, goes camping with French chefs, describes the wilderness without mention of indigenous people whose names are everywhere, and visits, of course, Voodoo Doughnuts, but also a traveling dinner society that calls itself something G*psy. This kind of national attention, which brought arts-district gentrification followed by the steel wall of Amazon development and SUVs, was part of what made Portland and Seattle the hell it is now. All this is just 2000s TV, but it makes you think about what has happened since, because of him and people like him who made gourmet food approachable and suggested that lowbrow food might be gourmet and made passion, talent and discernment into an industry: food bloggers, instagram photos of lunches, Yelp gourmands, and hundreds and hundreds of cooks on social media of all kinds who want to also highlight street food, diverse ethnic fare, and prove doing this that they know something to thousands of viewers, all of which have changed the face of restaurants worldwide.

Kitchen Confidential reads as kind of tame, self-aggrandizing and interestingly euphemistic about racism and misogyny now, but if you read anything else from the early 2000s about kitchen work, it was breaking down some kind of fancypants code of silence or a class divide. The ability of the book to be published in the first place speaks to who its author is– Bourdain came from a polished liberal arts school background, the son of a NYT editor and a Columbia records executive, and elected to slum it in kitchens for a living before making it big; his constant refrain that he is doing what he does for the money seems to me to be intentionally baldly fake, a kind of sleight of hand that avoids emphasizing that he chose this path, rather than more lucrative middle class ones involving writing or desk-sitting, because it does something for his masculinity, his ego and his passion to be part of the running hum of a kitchen team driven nearly to the brink of insanity by a dinner rush, and it makes him feel more alive. His ability to make it on his own skill is important to him, as is acknowledging everything he needed to learn to make that possible; he emphasizes that he was not working in the best or fanciest restaurants, but in large-scale operations that served “upscale” food at scale, which involved planning akin to feeding an army–with occasional products, like a particularly good focaccia or a delicious seared fish, to be proud of, and plenty of corner-cutting by packaging nearly-bad food into brunch specials.

The economics of food use in this book are fascinating. The years Bourdain actually was in restaurants arrived during a transition between obligatory heavy Americanized French standards (which MFK Fisher also opposed) and an age of, to hear him tell it, underground food revival and a return to focus on conjuring menus that were artistic expressions and made sense as food–simple, good ingredients, treated sanely, and also a lot of butter (the anniversary edition I picked up has annotations which indicate Bourdain changed his mind decisively on some of his recommended garnishes/necessary accoutrement over the years, like truffle oil or chives). Simultaneously, all restaurants are a business, and businesses are usually started by men with too much money and a dream, or alternately by people with a dream and no money, with tight margins and a race against time and other restauranteurs eager to snap up talent and saucepans when another place goes under. What was most interesting to me was the degree that organized crime is involved in the restaurant business he describes in New York in the 1980s; my feeling from talking to tons of people who have worked in restaurants now is that this has more or less waned in terms of The Mob, but, as Eric Adams’ tenure as mayor proves, the ability to open a rooftop bar often depends on pulling strings with someone in power via bribes or other actions. My broad impression is that now it’s private equity and rich men’s sons who open places of eating; they do so with more or less detachment from the actual running of the place, which, as Bourdain gleefully reports, lays at its core with the guy in the kitchen. I assume this is all why shows like The Bear are so exciting. Bourdain also speaks honestly about the work that goes into running a kitchen for a restaurant (grueling 12-hour shifts, at minimum), who does that work (Latin American immigrants) and who that work is for (old rich business guys who pee their pants). The things he describes–old seafood in omelets, old vegetables that could make you sick, abusive chefs etc– rhyme recent restaurant scandals, like the funky mold growing on jam in an upscale LA brunch spot that also underpaid workers, or the fall of Rene Redzepi, whose rise was premised on just the devotion to food+quality that Bourdain extolled and who hit his underlings. There are, Bourdain reminds us, simultaneous delectable fringe benefits: knowing an insane man who makes the most beautiful bread in the world, for instance, or knowing a brutal heavyset Provincetown man who understands fish to a depth unknown to the broader world, or getting nude and pretending to be dead in a freezer to scare a coworker.

Bourdain makes a fair amount of jokes about getting fucked in the ass all through these shows and his book, which I think are not actually un-homophobic, they’re just hot because he’s insanely sexy and you just know he would be a generous lover. I highly suspect Poppy Z Brite of writing his gay New Orleans restaurant novel Liquor (about two working-class lovers opening a restaurant) under the influence of Bourdain. The sex, as it were, comes into this book via his loving description of violence within the kitchen–gashed thumbs, mashed and burned fingers, gruesome sadistic codependence between chef and his devoted feudal vassals, who must return from hospital to work the line even should they be dying–and occasionally via actual sex happening at restaurants or adjacent to them, such as a tipsy bride in P-town in the 70s on acid (you go girl), a guy calling his coworker while fucking his own girlfriend so he can hear him cum, fucking between waitresses and kitchen staff (for more on kitchen dynamics between equals, I highly recommend Cannon by Lee Lai).

The sex in Rachel Hope Cleves’ Lustful Appetites is right at the center of her subject matter, though I will say that her pop-academic tone and position is a little more descriptive, removed, voyeuristic, and less, in itself, sexy to me. There is, from the first, a certain white-lady-academic distance being primly kept that reminds one of Lillian Faderman more than anything. That doesn’t mean boring. I picked up Cleves’ book because of her beef with Tillie Walden over Charity and Sylvia, the book about Vermont lesbians that Tillie Walden recently published through D+Q. Walden did a lot of visual research on what nineteenth century Vermont looked like and developed a visual pattern for the story of two women’s lives together, and then drew a fat book of lesbian history in a gorgeous format, but her facts about Charity and Sylvia came, it seems, largely from prior primary research by Rachel Hope Cleves, whose nonfiction book of the same name lays out info she gleaned from a range of different archives which made its way pretty much unaltered into Walden’s account. Cleves wants more credit than the one sentence in Walden’s dedication she got; D+Q is now publicly defending Walden’s honor in what I believe to be a clumsy way (one of their points is that Walden is underpaid, which seems to be something they could remedy). Gay beef is awesome when you aren’t part of it. My impression overall is that Cleves is more passionate about the nineteenth century lesbians than Walden, who was assigned the project because of being Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, and in fact wants to stake her claim on them because she loves them more. Anyway, because of her furor, and because I discovered I had previously cited her on MFK Fisher’s bi-ness, I thought her food book might be good.

Lustful Appetites is not, as its cover or subtitle imply, a broad history of all food+sex combos everywhere, which would be an interesting and definitely a global book. A more accurate subtitle would be Sex and the Restaurant, or maybe Sex and the French Restaurant, or maybe The Woman And the French Restaurant–by which she means the modern form of restaurant which developed after the guillotines paused. This is a history of how public places for rich people ordering and eating food off a menu were initially sex-segregated, and indeed were initially designed partly so urban upper-class men had a place to entertain and fuck their mistresses and hired sex workers away from the home–and a study of how sex then trickled down into men’s eating houses in America and elsewhere and how they changed and took different shapes over a couple of centuries, becoming places of entertainment for both sexes and eventually acceptable public sites for women of a respectable character. In a bit of a digression from the restaurant theme but not from France, she also dances around to Gertrude Stein and Natalie Clifford Barney and their love of food, disregard for ladies’ proper appetites, and bohemian gourmandise, and then goes on to talk about Judith Jones and the rise of Julia Child and, of course, MFK Fisher, who is also indebted to France. I liked the tea about Fisher and about all the 1940s lesbians sharing exes; I have this feeling Cleves could really tell a story or two about these lesbian liaisons, and I actually wish the whole book was about that. She is too generous to Stein. I liked the discussions of bohemian women deciding to be happy and fat, and of the shocked reactions to the sensuality of women’s food writing, because of the way food is sexualized. I have a feeling from the way Cleves talks about “food porn” as an unpleasant appellation that she doesn’t think very much of real porn….but look, she’s really into the MFK Fisher first-oyster passage, and you know, I am too.

One of the fun things Cleves talks about from the nineteenth century is the cabinee particular, which translates to basically a private fuck room where you and your girlfriend go to drink champagne (which she might or might not make commission on). These rooms were almost as famous as the food served in them; they provided a licentious image that scandalized English could rail against while catching the boat to France to sample. Bourdain circa 1999 would have a lot of jokes about that; Bourdain circa 2017 might solemnly nod.

Putting, for a second, sex in the restaurant aside, the sex of the restaurant was the most interesting part of this book for me. Bourdain thinks he’s all radical in 1999 for being a macho guy chef, but to be a chef professionally has always meant to be a macho guy–and to be in a restaurant was, for a really large part of its history, to be male or a sex worker. For all that right-wingers in the west use the unfreedom of women in Muslim countries as a cause to rally around the flag, the segregation of women in public spaces runs terribly deep in all directions, and “public space” as we think of it today–that is, a place of freedom of movement for women and men alike– is so recent and so limited. Obviously I knew coffeehouses were mostly male back in the 17th century, and I guess I had read that Woolf quote about hating being in restaurants, but Cleves demonstrates via a bunch of literary passages that actually all decent women weren’t expected to be in restaurants basically until well into the 1910s, because that’s where you went to fuck (if you were a woman). And eat–and eating was pretty bad, as bad as fucking. The long history of eating disorders in the anglophone world is one thing this book is pretty instructive on– and one thing I think gets erased from the historical record particularly, which is binge/purge cycles and binge/fast cycles; she cites ladies’ magazines telling girls to subsist on a handful of fruit and one soup a week, which seems like a the-more-things-change kind of situation. This is only upper-class women, of course; the poor are starving for different reasons, or else shoving down what they can before a factory shift. There’s a lot of anglophone women, it seems, from the middle classes, who desperately coveted a buttered roll, while meanwhile in France ladies were actually allowed to eat an oyster or whatever. Any attempt to establish more proper places for food for English girls led to those places, like ice cream parlors, becoming tainted with sex as well, because of the simple fact that women worked outside the home in them. Some performers in America seem to have been desirable because they were trans; Cleves briefly tracks what seems to be one trans performer across a few cities, where she was popular in revues. There’s some really entertaining bits about ad copy for ice cream parlors and other food-themed entertainment venues in 19th century America that are riffing on the French themes and promising pretty girls; the tenor is familiar, though the language a little alien. It’s odd to me to think about all this happening at once. Frontier culture in America–genocidal, with can-can performers who might be trans–while French colonialism triumphed over the Republic, failed, triumphed again, with consolidation and the wealth gap attendant.

Having so recently read about the Commune, it is wild to note that she skips right over it, not even acknowledging the many crises and revolutions faced by the non-rich throughout Europe. This is especially weird because her first book was about the political effects of the Reign of Terror rhetorically and politically in America. What gives, girl? Cleves also doesn’t devote a lot of time to talking about the material conditions for the production of what we call the restaurant (crudely: unemployed fancy court chefs had to do something after the aristocracy got its heads cut off, new money from England into wartorn France wanted places to carouse). Reading this book, you won’t find out what distinguishes these 19th-century restaurants it from a thousand less-fancy forebears, such as the inn, the eating house, the street-pie-cart. For working class food innovation and histories of the development of jarred pickles, toast, coffee and everyday viands, I highly recommend both the podcast The History of American Food by Greta Hardin (subject-specific half-hour episodes on everything from whiskey to clam chowder) and the book The Dairy Restaurant by Ben Katchor (which looks at the phenomenon of Jewish eating-houses which saved the poor from the labor of kosher kitchens at home, and how it tied in with vegetarianism and hygiene trends throughout Europe). Cleves’ focus remains on Europe and America’s upper classes and their expanding eating options, and on the women directly servicing them. Her focus on working people and their relationship to food/sex is mostly limited to their direct employment in restaurants and associated dance halls, ice cream parlors, etc–we do not get a view of street vending, any explorations of everyday food/wedding feasts among the proles, or really insight into anything other than urban settings. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating book and she has done a lot of great research.

“Yet aside from a regular nod from historians to the number and prominence of some of its foreign members, the non-nationalist originality of the Commune has not been central to the way it has been remembered. And the traces of the way this aspect of its distinct political imaginary was produced and practice are not easily perceptible in standard histories…for such traces we must turn instead to a passage like this one from the memoirs of Louise Michel. It is April 1871. She has already described, in her words, a “black man as black as jet, with pointed teeth like those of a wild animal; he is very good, very intelligent, and very brave, a former zouave pontifical converted to the Commune”: One very night, I don’t know how, it happened that we two were alone in the trench in front of the station; the former zouave pontifical and me, with two loaded rifles…we were incredibly lucky that the station was not attacke dthat night. As we were performing our sentry duty, coming and going in the trench, he said to me when we met up:

–What effect does the life we are leading have on you?

–Well, I said, the effect of seeing before us a shore that we have to reach.

–For me, he replied, the effect is one of reading a book with pictures.”

–as quoted in Communal Luxury by Kristin Ross, p.12

I have been reading and revisiting the dense little book Communal Luxury by Kristin Ross for years now– bending its paperback cover on beaches, carrying it on planes. I just reread it to my husband and got a lot out of it. I think the fact it’s gotten easier for me to read does speak to how your brain isn’t fully developed in your early twenties–I understand more what each page says the more context I get. This is a book about the Paris Commune, a two-month-long experiment in anarchist/communist living by the people of Paris, who briefly lived without their oligarchic “republic” and governed themselves during and just after a siege by the Prussians at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian war. Two months– but actually much longer, Ross argues, because in the decades between the circumscribed revolutions of 1848 and the Commune, longterm revolutionaries preserved the memory of radical action, and in the two or three years before the commune, especially after 1868, more and more popular assemblies were gathering and distributing literature advocating for women’s wages, for education for all, and for a secular order without private property. Notably, many people wanted to end empire, colonialism, and nationalism as well, and argued against the paternal racism of their conquering government. And though the revolutionaries were a minority, the extreme crisis of the war and the abandonment of the government persuaded working-class and illiterate Parisians to claim their power in 1871. The arrondissement-based micro-governments coordinated life relatively smoothly and democratically, considering circumstances–but the countryside did not rise up alongside the Parisians (having largely no idea what they were doing) and the city’s diffuse leadership was unable to coordinate military resistance to a re-conquest by the French army. Some estimates guess that over 10,000 people died defending the Commune during Bloody Week in late May 1871, and somewhere in the realm of 7,000+ people were exiled to places as far flung as Algeria and New Caledonia; in the aftermath, Communards scattered by exile seeded anarcho-communist theory throughout Europe and the broader world. State communists concluded that the Commune’s failure was not to consolidate power, a military, or a government fast enough; this influenced Lenin’s decisions around the Bolshevik takeover some fifty years later (Lenin is entombed with banners from the Commune). But, per the title, Ross is most interested in the Commune’s promise of abundance for all amidst scarcity, and its focus on aesthetic fulfillment. Polytechnic education, gender equality, artists who were workers and vice versa– these were the dreams of the people who took charge, briefly, of a cosmopolitan city spasming in the face of famine and war. Some of the ideas were appropriated into French education, such as preschools and secular schools.

One of the big stand-outs in this book is how much of the Commune’s ideological basis was essentially coordinated by direct word-of-mouth information dissemination in large rooms in the years leading up to the Commune, where ideas such as the end of private property are proposed to workers at the end of their working day. The theaters were shut down during the war, and many kinds of publications were restricted; people instead flocked to rooms where wages and the condition of workers are discussed. Ross marks one particular moment of explosive enthusiasm. Anti-Communard Chevalier d’Alix wrote that these spaces were “colleges d’France of Insurrection” (p. 15).

Though it’s a slim book, there’s a lot in it: anecdotes about Elisabeth Demitrieff, a teenager who, after reading a novel about communes at age 14, set off for England, introduced Marx to Russian revolutionary writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, thereby acquainting him with the Russian communal form of the obshina, which he hadn’t known about before (p. 24). She then went straight to the Commune and led women’s working parties which advocated for equal wages and significantly participated in setting up the infrastructure of self-government in Paris. The discussion of whether people could naturally self-govern in their own communities and share property, rather than competing over scarce resources, was being explored by figures like Kropotkin, who proposed that mutual aid was an essential part of human nature and used the Commune as evidence of this tendency in the modern era. Educators and theorists of the Commune thought about preschoolers’ needs, like aviaries of live birds to combat boredom and pictures of real animals and plants– and a schooling without religion which would prepare them both for trades and for poetry. Artists designed barricades and “signed” them by having their portraits taken with them. A shoemaker named Gaillard, heavily involved in the commune, had a philosophy of shoes as made for the natural human foot; decades later, a novel about ex-Communards records that people were still wearing these big, latex shoes meant to be more comfortable than the pinching leather shoes of the nineteenth century. One suspects Gaillard might have enjoyed Crocs. I can’t find any pictures of his shoes online. After the Commune fell, its memory impacted people struggling for revolution all over the world– and this was an aesthetic dream of spiritual fulfillment as well as a material dream of redistribution. It was not a unified, perfectly realized dream– rather, people were working out what they meant by a dream of utopia by just trying to do it, in extreme circumstances, where they were.

Eugene Pottier, author of L’Internationale, also wrote a manifesto of the Commune’s educational plan– tied to the Arts and Crafts movement, its dream was to produce less alienated students who would be less alienated workers, in ownership of their art and their labor: Pottier proposed, “that each child of either sex, having completed the cycle of primary studies, may leave school possessing the serious elements of one or two manual professions: this is our goal. All of our efforts tend toward attaining this result because the last word in human progress is entirely summed up by the simple phrase: work by everyone, for everyone. Humanity must arrive at the strict retaliation of this precept, which is as old as primitive socialism and is the basis of all equality.” (p 44).

Reading this book aloud to my husband, who, like me, loves children and education, I did have a moment of sudden uncontrollable sobbing when I thought about a theoretical Communard red diaper baby who attended preschool for two months amidst the new secular reforms–those birds(?), the memory of small hands grasping feathers– and then grew up to see the Russian Revolution– or a teenage Communard who might have participated, if they were lucky, in both. That is, someone Demietrieff’s age–who had survived prison or exile or just laying low amidst the working class, watching the repression of the 1880s and 1890s give way to a new wave of revolutionary fervor. Who was lucky enough to see the dream of the Revolution, of universal dignity and shared humanity, rise again from its ashes, to believe with their whole heart that the era of human suffering was done? Demitrieff’s death is poorly known, but she probably died around 1918; if so, she may have died believing that the revolution she fought for was being permanently enacted for all people, everywhere, and that a new phase of history had arrived. And it had– but we still have not achieved a universal republic or universal freedom for all people. What I appreciate about Ross’s book is it illuminates, in little flashes, something of the aesthetic life of ordinary people who dreamed and made art while working too, and their images of the future.

I wanted to write about Communal Luxury next to another book about activism which I read at the same time. Rather than struggling for complete overthrow of the government, ACT UP was instead struggling to save as many people as possible from a disease while being neglected by the government and medical institutions. The movement of resistance they led, however, was similarly diffuse, grassroots, and informed by an ideology of mutual aid, dignity and autonomy, and can also teach anyone who reads it a lot.

Let The Record Show is “by” Sarah Schulman–in that the 180 interviews which comprise its chapters were conducted, collected, and edited by her. But, while she’s a big name in NYC history and queer scenes, it’s not centered on her experience or her perspective. Like Communal Luxury, this is a book about a whole bunch of different people acting during an extreme crisis to produce revolutionary change, coming at it from a bunch of different perspectives. Schulman is a fantastic community documentarian. She wants to put this stuff on record, as the title indicates, because she has seen the narrative of ACT UP narrowed down to just the drug research groups which succeeded in first pestering/harassing the FDA and then in befriending Fauci and securing drug trial changes that allowed more pills to get into bodies. These groups, as her work acknowledges, were massively important in reducing deaths and in asserting human life’s value against a government bureaucracy moving all too slowly to combat an illness. Simultaneously, that group was mostly white, college-educated guys, who in the decades since their activist wins, have been allowed more time on the mic to define and note what their victories were. Women activists, activists of color, anti-imperial movements within ACT UP, drug user activists and youth have largely been left out of the picture. Schulman also notes a kind of inability to perceive other areas of ACT UP beyond one’s own cell of organizers–people’s irritation with “what ACT UP became” often referred to their own friends or former friends, rather than people doing other things somewhere else. By moving from one group to another, noting actions, wins, squabbles and mourning, Schulman successfully captures the diversity of tactics and of people that made up a massive push to change the tide of history and resist the massive loss of life stealing people’s natures.

Much of ACT UP was focused on medicine–but it was also focused on housing, art, and on safe access to care. After the US-backed coup in Haiti, ACT UP managed to resettle 100 Haitian refugees with HIV in NYC, after much scrambling. Before their arrival in NYC, these refugees were living with no medical care in tents on Guantanamo Bay. I had no idea of this history. ACT UP traveled to Puerto Rico to contact organizers there and setup a local chapter. ACT UP is the origin of safe injection sites in NYC; very young drug users with HIV participated in needle exchanges hoping to get arrested and brought to court to push the law in the right direction. It worked.

There is a narrative of women as caretakers, caregivers, and nurses to the sick and dying during the AIDS epidemic. Many people, of all genders, were doing care work at this time. But ACT UP was defined by moving beyond palliative care for people dying of a disease with no cure to demanding that the powers that be provide housing. And women activists were a major part of ACT UP, often bringing organizing experience in radical spaces from other movements like the Civil Rights movement. Some women who had no organizing experience but who had expertise on drugs or reading scientific papers realized their knowledge could be useful and began participating in meetings to help interpret information. Women were not recognized as capable of having HIV/AIDS until several years into the pandemic, and some expressions of being HIV positive only showed up in women, not men, leading to lack of adequate diagnosis–and exclusion from trials. While proportionately, the number of women dying was lower than men, those women who had AIDS were not receiving care.

Schulman notes that what brought people together–a unifying factor driving participation in ACT UP– seemed to be a lack of willingness to be a bystander in times of crisis. Sometimes people were pulled into activism by a loved one’s seroconversion, but there were also activists with no personal connection who saw the injustice and decided to try to fix something. This could cut across class and race and occupation–though in some cases, the solidarity dissipated when the crisis for richer whiter guys became less acute.

The thing that links the Commune and ACT UP to me seems to be the extremity of crisis that birthed it and brought new radicals into it: the school of life and the world, rather than written theory, showing people what was true and what must be done. Another thing holding them in common to me is the role that large physical rooms of noisy people had in making it happen– and how in both cases, taking action was the main driver in meeting. The goal was to do something– and people did. ACT UP’s framework was that there was no central authority telling people what was or wasn’t good praxis; if you could find people to do an action with you, you could do the action.

Both the Commune and the AIDS crisis and surrounding activism produced both deep solidarity that had not existed before and burned-out traumatized veterans whose grievances and interpretations of history might be difficult to understand without context. Many Communards died in poverty of tuberculosis or similar environment-caused health issues. The deaths of comrades in the AIDS crisis were caused by both a relatively new, deadly disease and state neglect/intentional genocide of undesirable populations. Rather than state repression outright smashing ACT UP organizers, the uneven tolls on different communities after the advent of protease inhibitors tore apart people who had previously been united by struggle. As AIDS reached endemic scales in Africa but became more treatable in the USA after 1996, some people stuck with activism around access, but many who could afford to do so peeled off into assimilationist complacency. For instance, women AIDS activists were trying to get the FDA to adopt a different definition of AIDS in order to allow women to get into trials; during a protest by women at a convention, one of the white-guy organizers was dining with Fauci. He held that he was attempting to make connections that would help everyone, and he was….but he was no longer really part of the same movement. A takeaway that keeps coming up for me is that most of the problems with revolutionary organizing are patriarchy and racism; this holds true here, too.

There’s some analysis that Schulman provides on the causes and meanings of the split that shook ACT UP in 1992– a less external Bloody Week which nonetheless fractured the diffuse, grassroots allegiance that had until now been effective at fighting alongside each other in common cause.

“At the time of the split (in 1992), Gregg felt there was a huge tension building up between T&D, and Maxine, Heidi and some of the women in ACT UP. There was a group who felt like T&D was making too many compromises by talking to the government and meeting with the drug companies, a belief that was only underscored when Risa and Linda ran into Mark in D.C. Gregg recalled that Derek Link started going after Maxine and a faction on the floor that was aligned with her in a “screed” demanding, HIV-negatives get out of our way.

Schulman offers this analysis on the split, the drug access group TAG, and the dissipation of ACT UP’s energy:

“We do know that in 1996, four years after the split, protease inhibitors came into general use, and they remain the basis for the standard of care today that keeps people with HIV living a full life span, if they have health insurance. These drugs were not developed or released because of ACT UP directly. Only the culture around the drugs was transformed by our activism. And we do know that many people living in America who are HIV-positive do not have dull access to that range of care, because the healthcare movement necessary to make the drugs available never manifested. We don’t know, if ACT UP had healed, if it could have become, created, or contributed to that health-care movement. We also know that twenty-seven years after the ACT UP split, The New York Times, on May 28, 2019, published a piece by Apoorva Mandavilli in which she wrote:

Women make up just over half of the 35 million people living with HIV worldwide, and the visus is the leading casue of death among women of reproductive age…Even in the southern United States, new infections in young women are helping to sustain the epidemic.” –p. 585

Two women, Maxine Wolf and Tracy Morgan, both accuse the other of being the force behind a moratorium motion to the floor that would ban ACT UP members from meeting with the government. This motion was born out of frustration with TAG, or Treatment Action Group. “There was a really a polarization between two groups, (Mark Harrington remembers), neither of which, Mark believes, spoke for the majority. “I think the majority wished that we would just work it out.” But he doesn’t recall that majority having much of the voice at the time. “We were on the edges and we were shouting at each other. It was very unpleasant. It was definitely getting in the way of us being effective and doing our work. So eventually we decided that it was not effective to keep on fighting… Personal attacks were also being made…TAG became a 501c3 nonprofit organization with a board and staff and consultants.” -p. 587

David Barr says that he could have “been a little less arrogant….I think we could have done it more.” Ann Northrop says the split was between “people who were interested in saving their own lives versus those who had a bigger vision, bigger issues, or were interested in saving other people’s lives.” She says of TAG, “their feeling tha women wanting to work on issues pertaining to women was hurtful to them was wrong, and to bring issues of race into it–and they saw that as distracting or whateer, I think that was wrong. So I think they were short-signeted…they’ve done a lot of work with pharmaceutical companies in doing drug research and I’m sure some of that has been productive.”

A small group of people, who dream– arrayed against all the forces of death and capital. Sometimes is is men with guns who come to kill, and sometimes it is neglect and disease. And always it is inequality that determines who tells the story.

MFK Fisher is one of a few complicated midcentury American women writers whose grip on me is functionally bottomless despite my distaste for her bourgeois class allegiance and politics. I was given The Art of Eating, a compendium of her works, by an older trans man I was dating in college. In a real way, she taught me to take dignified and unapologetic pleasure in food–and in cooking for others– after a youth of eating disorders brought on by body dysphoria, anxiety, and diffuse political guilt. Like another of my complex idols, Anaïs Nin, Fisher was brought up at the dawn of the twentieth century, died in its third quarter, and approached the sensual, the mysterious, and the taboo with a compulsive, incisive and occasionally hyperbolic documentary hyper-lexia which bucked the expectations of her class, her gender and her time. She was also what I can safely call a liberal racist, was apparently unengaged in any of the liberatory struggles going on around her either in Europe or America at any point in her life, and believed wholeheartedly in a kind of gustatory snobbery, in a self-aware but resigned way that’s alternately cathartic and chilling to read. It’s sort of impossible to discuss her without quoting her, so I will do a little of that throughout this piece; otherwise you just can’t get a sense of her style, which is so comforting and compulsively readable that I return to it whenever I am sick. I am sick now, with a cold I probably picked up doing library service on Rikers. Despite Auden’s assertion that she was the best prose writer in the United States, Fisher is pretty under-read among my generation, and on the few times that elderly patrons would request her work at NYPL during my tenure there, I would have to confess to them that we had but few copies, even of her bestselling WWII making-the-best-of-rationing-scarcity work, How To Cook A Wolf.

Her youth was almost contemporary with the youth of mixed-race comics artist George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat– a Southern California town, a life spent from her teens working for newspapers adjacent to astonishing vistas being rapidly transformed–but simultaneously a later edition of Agatha Christie, a world where improbable violence happened while girls went away to finishing school. Fisher tells us in The Gastronomical Me that the first chef to introduce her and her sister to true depth of flavor or savor was a woman named Ora, hired by her Puritanical grandmother who approved of only white sauces. Ora makes lovely pies, with dear little flowers in the crust. She conveys spice to a dish. If you are skimming this chapter, you might almost miss the ending:

“The next day, though, we found that Ora, instead of leaving her mother after a quiet pleasant Sunday in which the two elderly women had gone to church and then rested, had cut her into several neat pieces with her French knife. Then she ripped a tent thoroughly into ribbons. I don’t know how the tent came in…maybe she and her mother were resting in it. Anyway it was a good thing to rip. Then she cut her own throat, expertly… I don’t know about Father and Mother, but Anna and I were depressed. The way of dying was of only passing interest to us at our ages, but our inevitable return to ordinary sensible plain food was something to regret. We were helpless then, but we both learned from mad Ora, and we know what to do about it, because of her.” (p 363).

Cooking is murder; cooking is passions you aren’t allowed to have. Eating is complicity in murder. This passage rhymes with one far later in the book, also involving complicity and a slashed throat: Mary Frances and her second husband, who is dying, are traveling to Milan during the fascist period, and there is a refugee imprisoned on their train, along with some German tourists.

“Three men walked quickly through the car. Two were big, not in uniform but with black shirts under their hot mussy coats, and stubble on their faces. The man between them was thinner, and younger, and although they went single file and close together, we saw he was handcuffed to each of them. Before that summer, such a thing would have shocked us, so that our faces would be paler and our eyes wider, but now we only looked up at the old waiter. He nodded, and his own eyes got very hot and dried all the tears. “Political prisoner he said…then the chef with the highest bonnet saw us, and beamed and raised his glass, and the others turned around from their leafy table and saluted us too, and the door slammed behind the three dark men…We drank the rest of the Asti, and as people began to come in to lunch, we made the signal to the suddenly active boy that we would be back later. Just then there were shouts and thuds, and the sound of shattering glass. A kind of silence fell all about us, in spite of the steady rattle of the train. The old waiter ran down the car…finally the old waiter ran back into the car. His face was furious, and he clutched at his shoulder. The travelers stared at him, still chewing. He stopped for a minute by our table. His voice was very low. “He tried to jump through the window,” he said, and we knew he was talking about the refugee. “The bastards! They tore my coat!”...the vermouth was bitterer than any we had ever tasted, almost like a Swiss gentian-drink, but it tasted good after the insipid wine.” (p. 532)

When they arrive in Milan, they learn that the prisoner cut his throat intentionally on the glass of the window.

I like Fisher because she so clearly relishes the proximity of the violence, confusion and darkness of her own world; if she makes no attempt to reckon with it philosophically or treat its injustices as problems to be solved, she at least exactingly points to it, to make sure that you, too, see what’s going on. She went back and forth across the Atlantic during the years of the late 1930s, first divorcing one husband and then seeking medical care for another. She witnessed many Jewish refugees fleeing, and spoke to them, and befriended them. She witnessed a young cousin date a Nazi who spoke with humor of soldiers shooting swimming refugees along the coast of Italy. Simultaneously, she didn’t do anything. She was absorbed in her own life and troubles; she was not implicated. She floated on into midcentury, the deep well of her personal sadness unrelated to the mass exterminations reshaping Europe. But she is aware of that depth; another, more insipid writer might not have bothered to comment.

Fisher became a food writer because she personally was invested in food. She is one of the best-ever at writing about the experience of it, usually through the lens of her own life– though she herself said that the personal essay was self-indulgent. However, the popularity of her nonfiction was also part of a turn in publishing initiated by Julia Child and her determined girlboss editor Judith Jones–a response to the canned food and limited palate of American dining which attempted to remind readers and cooks of the pleasures and freedoms of the table–especially the European table, but also about the capacity for pleasure and consumption available to even the most modest American consumer. This freedom was partially about democracy and abundance of food in the imperial core, and partly class aspiration: Fisher, like Child, had the privilege of traveling to France with her husband and learning about cooking from the ancient culinary lineages there, despite all their financial instability during the Depression (in her historical writing, much more full of gas than her personal writing, she credits France with more than its fair share of world culinary innovation while misunderstanding most other countries). Her chops with talking about terrines of pâté in Dijon, remote restaurants in the French countryside, and perfect wines on trains in Italy were unassailable–while at the same time, her middle-class brusqueness, directness, humor and occasional coarseness or downright vulgarity spoke to a more democratic American skepticism for innuendo, euphemism or stuffiness. The pleasure of reading Fisher is the pleasure of reading about a woman pleasuring herself, a la Nin, combined with the incisive social commentary of an observant journalist and the occasional off-color characterizations or riffing of a David Rakoff or David Sedaris.

The proximity of queerness in MFK Fisher’s writing is just not debatable. Some examples are clearer than others. Every time gay people come up, she points them out to you, to make sure you also know they are there. One such is Ms Cheever, the housekeeper at the finishing school she goes to in SoCal in about 1920. There are at least ten or eleven times that I’ve insisted that people around me (in my house, or, more embarrassingly, outside it) listen to me read to them from the essay The First Oyster. This story concerns the first time that little Mary Frances ate a Blue Point –which was at a holiday Christmas party at her school.

“The oyster seemed larger. I knew that I must down it, and was equally sure I could not. Then, as Olmstead put her thin hand on my shoulder blades, I swallowed once, and felt light and attractive and daring, to know what I had done. We danced stiffly around the room, and as soon as a few other pairs of timid girls came into the cleared space by the tree…I floated on, figuratively at least, in Olmstead’s arms. The dance ended…Inez murmured in my ear, “dance with me next, will you, Baby-face? There’s a couple of things boys can do I can’t, but I can dance with you a damn sight better than that bitch Olmstead.” (p.375)

Fisher strongly and repeatedly emphasizes that homosexual crushes are the norm, and explains in clear terms that lovely big-nosed senior girl Olmstead and despicable junior Inez are courting her. At the same time, adult homosexuality is remote, more serious, and possibly frightening– while the college-educated girls’ school teachers might “write passionate notes” to a similarly-educated gym teacher, degree-less Ms Cheever’s existence mainly appears to Fisher to be characterized by a painful and class-based loneliness. Her care and zeal is put into the food that the school serves the students; when Fisher flees presumptuous Inez on the dance floor looking for more oysters, she discovers in the kitchen Ms Cheever and the school nurse.

“Her mouth, puckered from years of dyspepsia and disapproval, was loose and tender suddenly, and she sniffed with vulgar abandon. She stood with one arm laid gently over the scarlet shoulders of the fat old nurse, who was dressed fantastically in the ancient costume of Saint Nicholas. It became her well, for her formless body was as generous as his, and her ninny-simple face, pink-cheeked and sweet, was kind like his and neither male nor female…Mrs. Cheever did not see me either. For the first time I did not feel unattractive in her presence, merely completely unnecessary. She put out one hand, and for a fearful moment I thought perhaps she was going to kiss me: her face was so tender. Then I saw she was putting oysters carefully on a big platter that sat before the nurse, and that as she watched the old biddy eat them, tears kept running bloodlessly down her soft ravaged cheeks……as she watched the old woman eat steadily, voluptuously, of the fat cold molluscs, she looked so tender that I turned anxiously toward the sureness and stability of such small passions that lay in the dining room.” (p 377)

In her other memoir, Long Ago In France: The Years in Dijon, some of Fisher’s diaries are excerpted to paint a picture of her French existence. During this time, she details a visit to an alcoholic lesbian that she knew from her college years. The woman is in constant conflict with her girlfriend and housekeeper, is remarkably vain and lonely, and taken up with the care of terrible little dogs. This kind of unsympathetic portrait is typical, but so frequent and varied– an emotionally volatile gay milliner “giggles” and brags that he loves to lie naked with his cat on his tummy, a gay airline steward “twitches his tail” down the aisle. In another bizarre episode in Gastronomical Me, we meet a German man who seems sexually disinterested in his girlfriend, a “big, pallid” Czech woman who lives in the same boarding-house as the Fishers in Dijon circa 1930. German dude likes to talk to men– and says he believes in a “Uranic” society. “At least, I think Uranic was the word he used,” Fisher hedges. One night, the teen French son of the landlord comes and bangs on Mary Frances’ door in distress; he can hear a weird noise coming from the Czech girl’s room. When MFK enters, she discovers that the rat-faced German has been discarding his grapeskins and cake crumbs on his girlfriend’s naked belly; she has responded by having a panic attack he doesn’t seem to know how to deal with, and he leaves after MFK shows up. MFK in turn responds by closing the windowshades, covering the girl in a coat, and then running for Eau de Cologne, which she rubs all over the other woman’s naked body without, it seems, receiving any verbal communication at all. She communicates in her essay that she is thus moved to soothe/cleanse her of the nasty touch of her inexpertly sadist gay boyfriend. At last the woman ceases to moan and tremble, and MFK leaves her be– and the lady moves out the next week. What is so interesting in this scene–you really have to read it to understand–is how MFK manages to make it all sound like something that happened to her, eliding her own emotional responses besides concern for the girl–but not examining why she makes so little attempt to connect with her verbally before or after, or to explore why she wanted to touch her. MFK is more comfortable explaining that she divorced her first husband because he did not pleasure her sexually, and explaining that she fell in love with her second, only to lose him too soon; she is even more comfortable describing her relationship to food, which, while active, also positions her safely as a consumer, recipient, camera, acted-upon, at least as far as society is concerned. Indeed, unlike Child, Fisher was only ever a private chef; while she details recipes in some detail, she avoids making that her primary strategy for communicating. She wants to tell people how it feels to eat.

The most consensual, erotic same-sex scene which directly implicates Mary Frances herself is one where an insistent, domineering waitress force-feeds her several more courses than she ordered while she visits a country restaurant presided over by a famous chef, Monsieur Paul. The girl is described as passionate, heavy-breathing and annoying, but she manages to bend a lady to her will.

“I tasted the last sweet nugget of trout, the one nearest the blued tail, and poked somnolently at the minute white billiard balls that had been eyes. Fate could not harm me, I remembered winily, for I had indeed dined today, and dined well. Now for a leaf of crisp salad, and I’d be on my way. The girl slid into the room. She asked me again, in a respectful but gossipy manner, how I had liked this that and the other…”and now,” she announced, after I had eaten one green sprig and pronounced it excellent, “now Madame is going to taste Monsieur Paul’s special terrine…” and heedless of my low moans of the walk still before me, of my appreciation and my unhappily human and limited capacity, she cut a thick heady slice from the terrine of meat and stood over me while I ate it, telling me with almost hysterical pleasure of the wild ducks, the spices, the wines that went into it. Even surfeit could not make me deny that it was a rare dish..I was beginning, though, to feel almost frightened, realizing myself an accidental victim of these stranded gourmets. I began to feel they were using me for a safety valve, much as a thwarted woman relieves herself with tantrums or a fit of weeping…” (480).

Bi.org insists that Fisher and her school friend Eda Lord were lovers, per historian Rachel Hope Cleves.

Back to the older trans man who gave me a copy of her compendium, The Art Of Eating, to enjoy over summer vacation from my freshman year of college. The book was accompanied by Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, as well as White Oleander, Confessions of a Mask, the entire run of Dykes to Watch Out For, and Love and Rockets. He, like Fisher, was from California, but unlike her, had grown up an indigenous queer kid in foster care. He was loving, generous, troubled, and sexy. I think one of the things he wanted me to find in The Gastronomical Me was Juanito. I don’t communicate with this man right now– we had a run-in a few years ago that made me realize it is sometimes hard to be friends with a monogamously straight-married ex who has intentionally left behind all queer urban community because it has betrayed him. However, I would like to know, should we manage that friendship again, what he thinks of Fisher’s racialized and simultaneously intensely interested and human portrait of the mariachi band singer her brother is compelled by. When she arrives to visit Mexico, her brother David, who has been living there a while, hears a mariachi band coming up the way; later, he makes them all stay at dinner at a restaurant until his favored band comes back. It is led by teenage Juanito.

“He had a pale dirty skin and hair that was rusty black, like a half-breed’s, and there was a dry old look about him, as if he slept in the dust. His hair was almost shaved off, under the Jalisco hat, and his face was young and very weary. His hands on the guitar and his sandaled feet were like claws. He stood waiting in the light, and then began to sing one song alone, without his men, a raw wild yelling song like Flamenco music, but with the mariachi-beat to it. I was hearing it all, and watching him, and I was remembering one day when I was maybe sixteen. I was illed with eagerness, then, partly romantic and partly hereditary, to know more about my father’s newspaper office. He humored me, but only a little: I was a woman, and he wanted to save all that for David. One day, though, he took me through the Back Room, and I watched the linotypists and then went over to the job-presses…at summer that night we were talking about the little presses, and Father said, “There’s one chap there…I should have pointed him out to you. He does the finest work in the shop. He made a little trouble a few years ago…tried his hand at agitating. All right now. But he spends all his spare time illuminating..he’s the real thing. Churches and big companies wanting rolls of honor…that sort of thing…he uses real gold leaf.”

“Do you mean the short fat one, with white hair?”

Father stared at me. “That’s the one. Always has a cigaret in his mouth. He never says much, but he’s the best man in the shop.”

Before I thought, I said, “But father…that’s not a man! It’s a woman.”

…the next day he was so disturbed by this strange thing that might have been going on for so long in his own place that he called the forman, who laughed in his face. So father called the worker and she said, “yes. Do you want me to quit?”

He didn’t, but she stopped work for a few days, and talked to a minister, and after that she worked all week as a man, and then on Sundays she dressed in tailored dresses and went to church. I always felt badly about it,...

I knew, while listening to the harsh music, with the shadows jumping in the wind, with my brother and sister and even Sarah watching me. I felt bewildered and timid. If they already had the answer, why did they wait for my confirmation? Was I going to hurt anything?” (p562).

MFK in this passage clearly knows the way she has hurt the other trans man by outing him; she also reveals, in this passage, both that she was actively attuned to queerness/gender transgression in her own life such that the people around her treated her as a weather vane. David seems attuned in a similar way–though it may be to Juanito’s art, rather than gender, that he is attracted.

“The only thing that seemed to reach him, and then as a kind of reassurance, was the mariachi music. It has a visible effect on him, so that when he listened to it, I could see his skin change from a strange jaded gray to the fresh firmness rightful in a young man. No, I could not ask him questions.”

David is 23; MFK’s little brother. David takes lessons from Juanito in singing and guitar. He is in the town of Chapala under a commission to paint the municipal baths, which MFK and Sarah and Norah too paint, under his direction. MFK’s husband has just died. They work on the baths every day. The paintings no longer exist. His passion for Juanito puts a clear strain on his new incoming marriage; it also strains Juanito, who briefly goes back to living as a girl, under pressure of the priest, and stops drinking; when he relapses in the drinking right after the marriage between Sarah and David, David tries to help pick drunk Juanito up from the dusty street where he has collapsed, but the priest all but hisses at him, and he goes. And Juanito, after this, is in pants again. David tries to continue the lessons; something has changed between them. MFK thinks it is because David is clearly using fifteen-year-old Juanito as a tool for himself, trying to nourish himself off the young man’s music; he cannot see him as a real person. I trust this assessment. I trust less MFK’s assertion that the sexual desire between them was one-way, a crush Juanito had on the rich foreign man taking an interest in him, which prompted him to live as a girl in an attempt to win him, because of how obsessed David seems with Juanito. I recognize that desire. She makes no claim that her brother and the teen had any physical intimacy.

“I knew all there was for me to know about Juanito,” Mary Frances writes. “And what I knew made me sorry tha tany of us had ever gone to that village, and ashamed we were so big, so pale, so incautiously alive. If we had gone somewhere else, though, it might have been the same…not for Juanito, but for some other creature. Or if stars and bodies had been different, it might have been Juanito who with an innocence even greater than ours could blast our lives…But how can you know, when you walk through a room, that you have made such havoc?”

Juanito leaves the little village, and David and Norah and MFK go to Guadalajara before she returns to the States. There they run into him and his band one more time, by apparent coincidence. David asks:

“Señor” he said in his fluent bad spanish, “will you do us the favor of playing for us the song you think is most beautiful in Jalisco?”

Juanito looked at him for a moment, as if to decide something in a language never spoken. The men straightened, waiting, with their hands on their bows and strings. And Juanito, with his full black eyes moving easily from one face to another, in a new assurance, sang La Malaguena. It was so beautiful, and the high passionate woman’s voice rose so wildly above the whimpering men, and the strings beat so rhythmically in our hearts, that all over the beer-hall fell silent, and put down their steins, and turn to watch, as if that could make them understand what the music was meaning. It was a different song for each of us, of course. Sarah looked peaceful, suddenly…David’s face was calm and drowsy, remotely voluptuous, like a Chinese carving. And for myself, as Juanito sang the last bars to us and the weeping voices rose against hers over the rhythm, aI felt a kind of humility and thankfulness we were leaving. Juanito would be free again, as much as anyone can be who has once known hunger and gone unfed…”

These lines end her memoir–the chapter is called “Feminine ending”. What Fisher does not mention is that her brother David killed himself, just as her husband did, shortly afterwards. To me, it seems profoundly important that telling this story, so illegible to many of her readers, was so important to Mary Frances. Who is unfed? Who is unfree? She, alive, is in perfect control over her food and is able to live with some hard-won independence as a woman in America. But is there something else–like the newspaperman, like the singer–she would rather be doing. It’s here her analysis fails– Juanito is broke and laboring, but freer than Frances. Why else would she and David both obsess over him?

I really, really encourage you to read a little bit of this woman–so grounded in sanity, civilization and good breeding who is viciously hungry, cunty and verbose, who mirrors the villainy of her own time and is also capable of naming it, so that unseen and untasted things become visible and tangible.

After several months of having it, I finally read Sophie Lewis’s book Enemy Feminisms. I liked the introduction; she describes relating to the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute as a child, and about our urge to identify with evil women and then, rather than reckon with the origin of our affiliation with them, attempt to somehow redeem them. As someone whose first sexual fantasies were about Ursula from The Little Mermaid, I concur. Ursula, based on Divine, is evil, powerful, beautiful and fat, just as The Queen Of The Night is evil, glamorous and magnificent, and they both posit an alternative life to one under a patriarch’s roof. But Ursula seeks to steal Ariel’s voice and hypnotize the prince so she can rule land and sea, and the Queen wants to steal the Circle of the Sun. They don’t want power for other women, only for themselves. As Lewis says, in a short address to her younger self: “Hey there little Safoo…in the real world there aren’t goodies and baddies. More like comrades and enemies.”

As someone who has seen a lot of girlboss-leaning children’s biographies of Coco Chanel in my time (and even more books of associated random “women leaders” which place Hillary Clinton along with Harriet Tubman), I think it’s good to issue an (updated) framework on which feminisms aren’t working on universal liberation of women from patriarchy. Despite struggle, anger, demonstrations, lobbying, terrorism, and education, women aren’t yet free. Sophie Lewis thinks it’s time to recognize that some feminists and kinds of feminism were/are “enemies”, delivering empire/patriarchy/fascist violence more than liberation. There are racist feminisms; there are are anti-abortion feminisms, pro-cop feminisms, Islamophobic and transphobic and corporate feminisms, which don’t benefit all women, just some. I think what frustrates me about Lewis’s framing is that she doesn’t have a lot of interest in understanding why these self-interested, brutal forms of feminism flourish so–and she has a lot of vested interest in mocking their perpetrators, rather than examining what tides of history produce counterrevolution in the soul, in sisters. And I think that examination is important. I think that something that disappointed me about Enemy Feminisms a little is the way Lewis approaches her viewpoints as self-evident. She treats some demographics (Black women, trans women, colonized women) as kind of categorically incapable of bad thinking and doesn’t make much effort to connect her potentially enemy feminist readers with alternate paths. But it’s work others might build on.

I am going to consider Lewis’s framing of an Enemy Feminism as I think about a couple different pieces of media I consumed this week. One is Jill Wine-Banks’ memoir The Watergate Girl, about her time as a prosecutor on the Watergate trials in 1973-74, and her subsequent legal career. Another is the musical Operation Mincemeat.

Lewis’s strongest chapters in Enemy Feminisms are those on the period from the late nineteenth century through the mid-20th century, when feminine middle-class/pioneer strength/moral uprightness/hygiene became useful to imperial nationalisms, and where white feminists can be found simultaneously fighting for their own right to vote or to participate in civic life and fighting to limit the suffrage and rights of men of color, fighting to incarcerate sex workers, participating in the colonization of foreign lands, etc. In order to discuss the racism of white suffragists, it would be useful to contrast them with their alternatives; you could talk about anarcho-communist Lucy Parsons, anarcha-feminist Luisa Capetillo, or Indian feminist Savitribai Phulei, who founded early girls’ schools in India and set up adoption options for widows. Instead, Lewis’s examination of Black feminism is mostly limited to Sojourner Truth’s life and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s misreadings of it (important, but just one woman!). Lewis is much stronger in terms of her evidence base when looking at how the white suffragists of the late nineteenth century, who committed acts of terrorism against the British state through the Edwardian era, pivoted en masse to a jingoistic nationalism after Britain entered WWI–often working as battlefield nurses.

To defend a nationalist war fought for the capitalist class by people who couldn’t care less about women was confusing. Many women felt the national call compelled them to abandon their own interests— or saw opportunities in the nursing fleet which they had been trying to get via suffrage. After this strange 180, disillusioned state-hating feminists turned not only leftward, but also rightward– particularly young ladies of background like Mary Allen and Mary Sophia Richardson and Norah Elam, who helped found the British Union of Fascists and argued that fascism would deliver “equal pay for equal work.”

The cover of the pamphlet, Women and Fascism, declared: ‘You have the vote – yet are still powerless’, and inside the author, Anne Brock Griggs, sets out ten points of a Fascist policy for women. One related to better housing, another to mother and infant welfare, another to the need to improve the national food supply. But the pamphlet also supported equal pay for women, insisted on improved working conditions for women workers, opposed the marriage bar which stopped women from keeping their jobs after they married and advocated the entry of more women into the professions.

—A talk delivered by Martin Durham to History Workshop, 12 November 1983

Lewis spends some time making fun of fascist women’s love of stodgy uniforms, but exactly what the rhetorical moves of a woman’s recruitment into fascism might look like– or how you could turn someone around who you meet on her way there—are more in Enemy Feminisms by inference. We hear that communist women joined brawls against fascists in the streets. 20% of British fascists were women, compared to just 6% of Nazis before they took power. Fascism appealed to the disciplined, authoritarian impulses of the gender-nonconforming educated woman of Britain. And it was and remained an outsider ideology because of its disrespect for traditional channels of British class-based power— many of its critics did not care so much about the racism as they did its imitation of Italians. The Pankhurst family and their range of political positions works as a useful microcosm of what the allure of fash shit was—power, the promise of dignity that regular femininity had not afforded, the momentum to Go Somewhere. Outside fascism per se, the creation of uniformed half-police vice squads which immediately set about arresting sex workers to protect troops despite their leaders having campaigned supposedly for all women a few years earlier is revealing. This stuff is pretty central to understanding western/white feminism’s relationship to states today— some women feel that they can control other women and exert power over them better than men can and should be allowed to do it. Adela Pankhurst, Emmaline Pankhurst’s daughter, vacillated from one political extreme to the other– she helped found an Australian communist party, but then helped found the Australia First movement in the early 1930s. Her mother Emmaline was part of a generation who won the vote and then railed against Bolshevism. For the elder Pankhurst, this was rooted in the obvious supremacy of British empire: “I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours,” she said.

Operation Mincemeat, a new musical now on Broadway, is a product of a kind of exceptional technical prowess plus ideological and writerly drought: it features a cast of five who do probably two hundred (a thousand?) quick-changes not only between costumes but between fifty characters and endlessly rotate sets and whirl between scenes to tell the story of Operation Mincemeat, a WWII-era hijink wherein Nazi troops were directed away from Sicily via false intelligence they found on a corpse who seemed to be an English pilot, but who was actually a dead Welshman that MI5 gave papers to and dropped in the waters off Spain. The slapstick comedy and larger-than-life characters bring back a vaudeville charm to the stage, but Billy Elliot this is not. While the spectacle is moving, it’s fundamentally a piece of retrospective war propaganda, whose class critique of inept, snooty rich boys gives way to pious tears of patriotism, and whose rendering of Nazis is essentially comedic–worrisome, in today’s climate. In the midst of all this, we get Hester and Jean Leslie, two women working in MI5 whose labors are consistently undervalued but who are essential to the operation’s success. Hester, an uptight old hoss played by a gay man who also plays the back-alley butcher, the sea captain, and many others, sings a moving song about her lover who died in the first World War, whose death brings into question war’s utility–but then encourages her protege Jean to accept her role in the shadows compared to the men and investigate whether their colleague is a communist spy, as they work together for the glory of Britain without receiving any medals.

The above song brought my mother to tears; it’s also an exploration of a kind of sentimental propaganda for nation which ties women’s work/exploitation to dignity, identity, and purpose–a basically conservative argument that women’s power or ability to ask for respect as human, or to enjoy love without the interruption of machines of death, is subordinate to the will of the nation/the cause. There is dignity in self-sacrifice, but after witnessing the underhanded and illegal conduct of MI5, one has to be very attached to the Union Jack to buy this song. Black americans fought for America and came home to segregation, as women manufactured weapons or served in the WACS while being denied the right to no-fault divorce or equal pay; 2.5 million Indian troops fought for Britain in WWII as Britain allowed mass famine back home. To believe in cause as justice, you have to ignore the times that you, as an oppressed person, are abused by men on the same side/nation as yourself. If there is no war, this vision of dignified submission dissolves; Friedan and the civil rights movement both found new adherents in the 1960s and various colonized peoples revolted against their imperial rulers. During this time, all kinds of feminisms were being practiced and populated.

Sophie Lewis doesn’t work particularly hard to talk about the years between World War Two and the 1970s; after talking about KKK feminists in the South and proto-cop feminists in the 1930s who arrested sex workers, she picks back up her thread with second-wave anti-porn and trans-exclusionary threads of radical feminism, and doesn’t even really touch on Golda Meir, communist or anarchist feminism, trade unionism, women in/against anti-colonial revolution, or McCarthy. This, in contrast to her insightful connection-mapping earlier, makes it hard to trace the development of women’s lib in America/Britain and its competing threads in the latter twentieth century. But if we were going to think of, say, an imperial, nationalist, girlboss feminist of the late twentieth century whose life might serve as a cypher into what it means to be an enemy feminist from the inside, we might picture someone like Jill Wine-Banks (formerly Wine-Volner).

I caught upon Wine-Banks’ memoir The Watergate Girl in the Queens Public Library last weekend while waiting on a bus, and was drawn in by her affable, conversational style. After participating in civil rights marches and joining Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, she started her law career working in organized crime prosecution under the Department of Justice– and mainly going after trade union leaders. Trade union leaders of the 1970s, particularly the Teamsters, were embroiled in racketeering scandals involving the mob; they had irresponsibly invested pension funds in casinos. But let’s face it: Wine-Banks helped dismantle organized labor. She also worked with anti-communist groups lobbying for “captive European nations”. To her, these felt politically of a piece. Wine-Banks is best known for examining Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods on the stand about how eighteen and a half minutes of conversation about obstruction of justice got deleted from a tape; in the courtroom, Sirica made several sexist comments when she was examining witnesses, and out of it, she was subject to belittling comments about her dress, her expression of emotion, and her relationships. Persecuted by her misogynist husband, she carried on an affair with another lawyer, a German refugee who had been in the Hitler Youth as a child; the complicated politics of this she notes, but skates over.

She was among the first female lawyers to be that prominent in American politics– afterward, she became General Counsel of the Army under Carter. Surveying Korea from a plane, she advised the president to keep troops occupying the peninsula because of North Korean military strength; American military presence in Korea has been linked to forced prostitution and murder. She gives an amusing account of learning to parachute out of a plane in solidarity with women soldiers, and discovering that U.S paratrooper helmets do not fit women’s heads. Then she became head of the American Bar Association, left under a slight cloud after arranging prosecution for the veterinarian who accidentally killed her Dalmatian, and then became, bafflingly, vice president of Motorola–yeah, the telecoms firm. She’s also been a legal analyst for MSNBC.

What I was struck by throughout Wine-Banks’ memoir is her conviction of her allegiance with justice, with sanity, and with Good People across her entire career. For her, feminism meant inclusion in existing mechanisms of power, and this inclusion–for Black americans, for women, for anyone– was within reach if you were competent enough. She pauses to take note that the jury for Nixon was mostly Black; she calls Barbara Jordan’s voice “like the voice of God, if God was a woman of color” (yikes). For her part, her feminism took the form of verbal self-advocacy in the workplace against demeaning remarks, and eventually, her pursuit of a divorce from her belittling, unpleasant husband–and advocacy for women soldiers, who needed to be outfitted correctly in order to be able to… kill people better. She treats the goodness of the Army as self-evident. She traveled with her new husband to be married in a traditional ceremony in Papua New Guinea, an exotic locale that she uses as an expression of her freedom and new passion, now that she is out of her stifling marriage. And she then spent her life bolstering the nation that she saw, despite her experience with its corruption, as a model to the world. In her afterword, she is baffled by Trump’s rise to power, with the failure of the checks and balances that just barely were able to stop the machinations of Nixon.

Wine-Banks gives very little credit to women before her who fought for her legal rights; she also gives very little credit to women of her own time who were more raucous, less well-behaved, or women who were more politically radical–such as, say, Maxine Wolfe, who started her activist career in left-wing movements of the 1960s and continued into involvement in ACT UP in the 1980s. She does not need to think about these women; nobody has made her recognize her links with them. In Wine-Banks’ story of the late twentieth century, these angry, braless women do not exist; feminism is achieved by finding a better husband. Despite her awareness of anti-Vietnam-War protests, she does not mention the anti-war movements against the Gulf War or the Iraq or Afghanistan war. Despite her mention of a PLO terrorist who killed a New Yorker, she does not mention Israel. It’s difficult to understand the kind of inward-looking false innocence of women of Wine-Banks/Hillary Clinton’s generation. It can be frustrating to experience someone–often a mother, or a friend– who believes that merely to be a woman is to be imbued with an intuitive sense of justice, of care, or of patience or some other virtue, which will translate inevitably to better politics if they are in power, or even behind the scenes of power. What I find kind of critical is to figure out how self-serving white and nationalist feminisms can crack or break, leaving fissures for more solidarity.

The Series Of Unfortunate Events struck me as a gimmick when I first saw it at the Scholastic book fair as a kid (before I got obsessed), and indeed, it is a gimmick of marketing. Printed on paper-over-board with weathered cloth covers, deckled edges, interesting+slightly vintage-looking art, typewritten frantic insets, and intentionally opaque dedications/afterwords, published under the name of a fictional narrator whose relationship to the central characters is hinted at throughout, it was a fantastically timed blockbuster for children who had been persuaded to read about Harry Potter and found they enjoyed reading. The books are chapter books for middle-elementary readers written at approximately a fourth grade reading level, with a predictable, repetitive, reassuring structure, but they also build into a complex, longer story with a lot of loose ends which dangle tantalizingly, only sometimes wrapped up. There’s a lot of humor in the thirteen books, mostly based around wordplay, literary allusions, foolish adults, random horrible happenstance (crows popping a balloon carrying an escaping inventor, an elevator-shaft-related-death, a circus of lions). There is an amusing game/content warning system the author plays throughout: Handler keeps reminding you that you can stop reading at any time and dispose of his book. He repeatedly encourages you, in fact, to do so. When parents upset at the abuse/snake bites/murder content protested his works, Handler cheerfully agreed that their children should read something else. The whole thing is a little twee; you could see it as pretty naked reverse-psychology marketing, which I initially did when I was nine. But reading the books, I found that I felt deeply respected by Handler. And I can connect the series directly to a moment from my childhood: I learned, from my friend, that her father’s friend he was going fishing with had been convicted of doing bad things to children and wasn’t allowed to be directly around us. We had to watch him, out the window of her bedroom, to know when it was Okay To Go Outside. When I tried to bring up the man’s misdeeds, socially inappropriately, with my friend’s parents, they were so evasive it was as if a door had slammed shut across language. If I had not had the language to talk about adults who did bad things to children from Handler, I am not sure I would have felt anything but panic or darkness in that moment. Of course, Handler doesn’t talk about sex–it’s other crimes.

The plot, roughly summarized, is: there are three orphans, and an evil man named Count Olaf who wants to steal their money and intends to kill them once he’s done it. He attempts this by fraudulent underage marriage, caging babies, lumber mill accidents, school-based abuse, lions, and many, many fires. As the Baudelaire orphans flee him, they find more and more information about the secret society their parents were part of which Olaf was also part of: the Volunteer Fire Department. The VFD suffered a schism, the cause of which remains mysterious to the Baudelaires–and it seems that while some of the members set fires and some put them out, it seems more confusing all the time who is who. The charming, intelligent, kind orphans are implicated in more and more accidents and violent acts themselves as the books go on–and though being framed for murder or hypnotized into nearly committing murder can be excused by an empathetic reader, the last two books of the series see the baby one set fire to a hotel full of people, including their parents’ friends, in order to escape a show trial–and they set sail with Olaf. In the last book, they fail to stop (or don’t try hard enough to stop) a cult from mass self-poisoning, then help a dying woman give birth, and then attempt to parent the baby and embark on their adult lives. Now it is going to be the baby Beatrice’s series of events–fortunate or not.

ASOUE is pretty Talmudic, with its many meta-texts layered around the central text and authorial commentaries in addition to afterwords, asides, tangents, supplementary books, and interpretations. When I took a class on European Jewish Literature in my first semester in college, I read Irene Nemirovsky and Stefan Zweig and abruptly recognized something distinctively familiar in their themes of assassinations, concealed identities, existential ennui, ineffective heroes, and complicated self-denial, and went back and read the whole series while also, myself, not really knowing very much either about the Holocaust or the Jewish political world in Europe before it. But there’s plenty of articles to prove I’m right. ASOUE might as well be a kind of Chronicles of Narnia for diasporic American Jewish children, as imbued with the values of depth, of moral ambiguity, of dark humor, and of loss as Narnia is imbued with Jesus and purity polemic. Handler is Jewish, and has a father who got out of Germany in the late 1930s. Reading the last two books in the series while helping a friend weed her school library, I found myself noticing that much of the VFD and its schism and organizing feels a good deal like a looking-glass, child’s-eye history of the Bund as written by Molly Crabapple. Friends and lovers and siblings find themselves struggling for a common goal–freedom, socialism, the written word– but end up on opposite sides–while meanwhile struggling against larger, more complicated enemies at the same time, such as ignorance, xenophobia, illiteracy, and a kind of apparently innate drive that everyone has to hurt each other. Without historical context (and sometimes with it), the tensions, pain and loss of your elders are only a series of clues; if you do not choose to follow them to their source, you will be operating in the dark, sometimes literally, and you will find you are murdering someone else who doesn’t have anything to do with you at all. Even if you do know where the stories come from, much of the library is lost in a fire. At the end of the series, the children save themselves by being led to an apple by a snake. The apple, hybridized with horseradish, is the only cure for a deadly mycelium: the bitter with the apple is knowledge, is memory, is life.

They’re brilliant books, and they spoke to kids–to me. They’re also kind books. They respect that children are experiencing all kinds of things that adults do not want to acknowledge, that they force children to endure (like sexual abuse, which Handler experienced). They encourage children to dream of creative solutions to their various imprisonments or experiences of neglect and violence, and they encourage children to read, so they can understand why adults are behaving so terribly. So what are the limits? I would argue that the stylistic packaging elements are now dated–this just happens in kids books. You can’t get kids to read old Babysitters Clubs; they need to be re-drawn as comics which look fresh. But also in the text, there’s a pretty wide-ranging unexamined misogyny operating. While women are smart, and competent, gender-nonconforming women are fairly frequently lampooned, from a spoiled-brat tomboy to a rich, evil slutty heiress to an anxious hysteric to an ineffectual, idiotic judge, in ways that do feel profoundly gendered and kind of extra-vicious compared to the caricatures we get of men as power-hungry, conceited, or simply without insight. One of the cooler women, Kit, dies in childbirth for no believable reason (the horseradish cure doesn’t work on pregnant people). There also is no racial politic to speak of within the world of the books, except that Handler regularly reminds you, the reader, not to be racist toward people wearing turbans–a fair enough reminder during the post-9/11 era. But most of the turban-wearers are white people in brownface. The world of the book, like the world of almost every children’s book before 2014, is almost entirely white– perhaps because the vague vibes are actually imported from the Pale of Settlement, and without an open discussion of the antisemitism and racism of interwar Europe, sit uneasily alongside the series’ vaguely Transatlantic setting where all cities are Chicago but not. And also, the protagonists are rich; they understand themselves to be entitled to an old wealth (the source of their parents’ wealth, like the Potter family, is never really clear). While they move in precarity and take factory jobs, the problems of poor people are never actually their problems, as long as they survive. This makes the books fascinating from a political/literary analysis lens, dated from a sales/library lens (it’s been done to death), and pretty ineffective from an educator/parent/child-understanding-the-world lens. Most children aren’t rich, though in America, they are all taught to dream of being millionaires. In America, racism and its history, and settler-colonialism and its history, are specific and real and their contours shape the land under our feet and the secrets in our libraries. Real children move among freaks and criminals; Handler blurs the line many times and shows you how even rich kids, too, might be freakish or criminal, but he does not question whether some people deserve to be rich, and this seriously limits the ability of his books to talk to the full world that children live in. More recent children’s books, like Tracey Baptiste’s Moko Magic series or Kat Leyh’s Snapdragon or The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson all speak in a similar way to buried secrets, hidden violence, and the power that children can claim by unlocking historical puzzles, but in a way that is actually responsive to the real history of America. In Moko Magic, an African mythic being is causing violence at West Indian Carnival in Brooklyn; finding out who it is, and naming it and explaining its history, turns the monster into a child. In The Parker Inheritance, a mysterious letter about a long-buried shame reveals information about recent injustice. In Snapdragon, eccentric characters and gender nonconformity across generations shows that some things hidden in the woods are not about hate, but about love. All of these books are great books which can lead children to knowing more about the real world they live in. And also, far more didactic than Handler would probably like, and not as snarky, and all resolve with neat, positive, forward-looking endings which frankly are not as satisfying to someone beginning to understand the world doesn’t always reward the just. These progressive, skilled, artistic books attempt to bring narrative coherence and progress back into a world where sometimes there just isn’t, where, in an empire ruled by billionaires and warmongers, there is only floundering.

Ok– to Hogg.

Hogg is a complicated book. And it’s for grown-ups. It might implicate you just because you own it. I saw a Reddit post today in the subreddit “BookshelfDetectives”, where the copy of Hogg (rather than the bookshelf owner’s unsheathed machete) was labeled by a largeish number of users as a “red flag”.

I’ve been in a reading group for Hogg. Our facilitator, Becca, has let us know throughout, kindly, the same thing Handler let his readers know–you can stop reading whenever you want.

The first thing you need to know–because it will enable you to opt out of reading the rest of this essay if you want to– is that Hogg is also about an orphan being exploited, but it discusses what a children’s book cannot: sexual violence. This is a book about a nameless, racially ambiguous impoverished eleven-year-old who has been sexually abused for something near his whole life, who has no parents, and has nobody looking out for him, who is adopted/abducted by a “rape artist” named Hogg. Hogg implausibly moves through the world without being apprehended despite being personally filthy and ill-mannered to kind of Roald Dahl villain levels (he eats beans with his hands, never bathes, and smells like a rotten meat fridge). Unlike many popular novels written about sex trafficking, like Sold by Patricia McCormick, it is not about a noble child enduring horrors that the reader wants to see more of in order to vicariously experience courage: rather, it’s about a child with no apparent morals or limits who has some of the worst things done to him you can think of and kind of enjoys them. The experience of reading is, rather than inspiring, exhausting, unsettling, triggering and upsetting. The child’s adjacency to violence does not visibly trouble him: he is not a fallen rich moral child, but a creature from the underbelly of the world who has not learned to be anything other than a monster. Hogg works for cleaner, more powerful men and sometimes women who hire him to hurt women. Hogg has a team of guys who commit incredibly detailed violence for the first half of the book. In the second half of the book, a teenager who worked with Hogg goes on a serial killing spree in what seems to be partly a state of psychosis. The protagonist alternates between having sex and witnessing the frantic, salacious media coverage of the ongoing crimes. Eventually, he thinks about leaving Hogg. The book ends without him doing so.

I consider Samuel Delany one of my favorite writers, but this is not my favorite book by him. Hogg is a scream of a book– a scream of rage, and of agony, rather than of humor, though the satirical passages about the cops and the radio station are unexpectedly, jarringly funny. And there are, amidst upsetting passages, really locked-in prose moments that sing or really stick with you horrifically in ways you know you will never forget (such as one sentence about “cold snot” that will disturb my relationship with my own body till I die). But it is not a scream which angles in a particular direction or speaks in a very purposeful way; rather, it’s a tangle of sensation. I think it can be best understood as kind of historical emotional texture work. I think it’s doing a similar project to one that many people, from R. Crumb to John Waters and Kenneth Anger to who knows how many others in so many fields, did at the same time. The difference between Crumb and Delany is that Delany is a gay Black guy who, according to his own memoirs, found himself entertaining sexual fantasies about experiencing racial violence from a young age which made adults around him uncomfortable, and whose youthful interracial marriage or street-based cruising was often depicted, at the time he did these things, as at least as dangerous and evil as actual violence. Faced with misogynistic violence and imperial violence and police violence and your own complicity and your own terrible capacity for harm, you make– a project. It’s a new, loose, unprecedented project, where you break rules because you do not respect institutions, and simultaneously use your significant artistic skill to satirize the violence and try to take the world and your reader to task for the way all this violence is in front of us all the time but is rendered somehow unspeakable.

There’s a relief in art like this– the relief of hearing someone say, hey, all you respectable people, there’s shit and sex and blood everywhere, and you say you protect children but you don’t, and you don’t even try, and you–and indeed I–barely can see women as people! And what Delany is trying to do is say, men are the problem here. What is also interesting is that there’s imperial, capitalist violence happening too, but the mechanisms all tangle, as they probably felt tangled to him. What was the direction of the world? Who could you trust? Communists had been rooted out of America, and before they’d been rooted out, they were pretty homophobic and had both done a lot of good and failed to transform society. Utopia had not arrived from revolution. This book was written during the My Lai massacre and the bombings in Cambodia, during the aftermath of the MLK shooting, in the leadup to the Stonewall Riots, in the long decay of the organized labor left in America. And it was written during what is clearly Delany’s feminist awakening– waking up to the actual extent of misogynist violence being perpetuated by guys called “nice” by their friends and endured by people all around him, such as a friend who was left sleeping on the street after her roommate was assaulted by men hired by an ex. What he does with that is an interesting kind of second-wave reverse Hothead Paisan: an orgy of masculine darkness, with no moon and no goddess and no release, except in the possible escape of its protagonist and the reckoning it is trying to produce in the reader. Reading this book, you do get to see a side of Delany you don’t really see often– anger. His interesting dual intro-essays, written as himself and also as a feminist implicitly woman scholar, The Scorpion Garden and The Scorpion Garden Revisited, speak to the book as his attempt as a kind of feminist critique of the world/his own writing. Rarely for Delany, I find in both a lot of hot air and not necessarily useful ways in to the text of the book, though they are useful ways in to thinking about Delany’s feminism, his approach to porn, and his often-masked ego/his approaches to fixing or confronting his own misogyny.

I learned through my reading group that Delany laid out and wrote Hogg around the same time as Dhalgren. It is not like Dhalgren in a lot of ways. Dhalgren, to me, feels both more intentional, more structured–though not literary– and in many ways more playful. But both are kind of trying to reckon with the idea of a world full of violence with no single saving social movement, which is the America Delany was experiencing during the late 1960s, the total directionlessness of someone lost with few elders and little conscious past amidst a world of pain. Some of the violence is racial; some is sexual. People within the world of both stories sometimes try to pretend that nothing is going on, even when their children die or the world is burning around them. Dhalgren depicts another nameless, racially ambiguous main character, though this one is grown-up, and while he seems pretty likeable, he’s also capable of losing time in ways that frighten the people around him, and he seems to be committing some pretty agentic, sometimes violent actions in those missing days. Dhalgren and Hogg are both anti-utopian books about navigating a frightening and shifting world where each decision may have unforeseen consequences, and where, even if you do not intend to participate in violence or interpersonal conflict, it might find you anyway. They are books about feeling like children lost in a mad world–Dhalgren’s main dude is nicknamed Kidd/The Kid. Dhalgren, it must be said, has many more woman characters than Hogg. In Hogg, when you see women, it is implied that they have full, complex lives offscreen, despite mostly suffering onscreen, and you do get to see one director of a local radio station who radiates girlboss and a disabled child victim who pops off at her rapists a line which fixes her as a distinct, terribly vivid, dynamic personality as she looks up from the floor as they leave: “you guys are so annoying!”

Hogg is more banned than most banned books–and it is only available at NYPL in the main reading room, rather than as a circulating copy– but it is freely available on Amazon. Its tenuous presence in NYPL it has in common with another book, much less clearly related to it, which I am going to try to connect to it here: Stuart Little.

In a New Yorker piece from 2008, Jill Lepore describes the beef between Anne Carroll Moore and E.B White over Stuart Little. (use removepaywalls dot com to read if you lack a subscription). Moore designed the first children’s libraries in New York, removed age and gender restrictions on using libraries, hired competent, caring multiracial librarians, and worked for three decades at NYPL. As Lepore says, “merely in bothering to regularly criticize children’s books Moore was ahead of everyone.” She acted as authority on children’s literature as long as she could after, to the extent of initiating the whole field of children’s book reviews. This was the dawn of children’s literature as a market, and Moore was concerned with making sure children had good books to read, such that she actively pushed talented writers she knew of to write for children, too. She encouraged children’s literature from E.B White, whose wife Katharine White reviewed children’s books for the New Yorker. When she got the final manuscript, though, she changed her mind. Stuart Little was a boy who was also a mouse– and he did all kinds of dangerous, confusing things which, while exciting and adventurous, were unsuitable for a little boy or mouse to do. He also seemed to rocket very quickly from childhood to competent maturity, gravitating toward danger and romance away from the bosom of home. Moore’s concern was that the blurring of modern setting with unreality of mouse action was bad for kids– and she really tried, for months and months, to block the book from going into the library and issued many edicts to the effect that it should not be accessible to kids. Stuart Little drove off into the sunset, into ambiguity. What kind of end was that? Children liked it. E.B White, who wrote Stuart Little, was pioneering a new kind of fiction. It was, fundamentally, a postwar fiction–one which scoffed at preciousness, though it now seems to us precious.. In a world where the Holocaust had happened, where the nuclear bomb had happened, you couldn’t have parents advising you, or adventures without stakes. The American kids who grew up reading Stuart Little would encounter, later, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. And many of them, in many places, were encountering private violence too. Any kind of literature which rendered escape possible, power possible, for children, was probably useful to them.

Wesley’s father (who has a large nose) says Wesley “sticks out like a nose” for his lack of enjoyment of sports and sensitivity, and his parents seem concerned about his social life, studiousness, implied effeminacy and general demeanor. It occurs to Wesley that since all civilizations grow their own special food crop, then if he can cultivate a new food crop over summer break, he can found his own new culture–and, quite obligingly, glowing flower seeds descend from the heavens, like the Oscar Wilde alien pop star brooch in Velvet Goldmine. Once planted with new seeds, Wesley’s backyard lawn becomes aflutter with mysterious new red flowers. “You’ll have bedlam if you don’t get those weeds out,” a neighbor devoted to Brussels Sprouts order says. Wesley answers– “in this type of garden, there are no weeds.” His experimentation with allowing difference immediately proves worthwhile, as it allows the instant eruption of a garden-jungle of giraffe-height flowers, which have delicious fruits. “Peach, strawberry and pumpkin pie and flavors he had no name for,” Wesley muses in his newly green-and-shadowy backyard--echoing, except in the particulars, the first white guy to eat durian and write home about it. The cultivation of the plant seems to happen without much work or foreknowledge of gardening, though Wesley instantly finds out many ways to use it, implying a certain industry. The crop also has potato-style tubers that make lovely fried snacks and hemp-style stalks that make wonderful soft cloth, which entrepreneurial Wesley weaves on a loom himself. After inventing a new number system based on the petals on the flowers, Wesley invents a suspiciously Quidditchy/Lacrossey sport hybrid that he’s actually good at, and then beats everyone else at it. He renames constellations. He makes friends, who all obey him; he returns to school with a crowd, promising social transformation.

Roxaboxen, meanwhile, is about a relatively matriarchal pretend-play world invented by Marion, who “always knew the name for everything” and christens the rocky hill by a recently-developed stretch of craftsman houses Roxaboxen. The description of the site itself might be a study for how colonialism establishes itself in a landscape and then reflexively attaches itself to a site: “Nothing but sand and rocks” in the narrator’s first pass at it, it contains “cactus and greasewood and thorny ocotillo” in the next line.

Marian, sharing a name with The Librarian, who lifts her hands to the sky like Moses, leads other 1910s white children to join her past the imaginary river, on her flower-speckled rocky hill. “ This treasure of a story is about magic--the ordinary magic that every child understands: imagination. It is also a story about a treasured place: a child’s imaginary town named Roxaboxen. The rules are simple: you make them up as you go along according to the whim of the day or the personality of the residents,” wrote Jane Marine for School Library Journal when it was published. But Roxaboxen is mostly not invention: it is parroting, with boring directness, the adult world, with its recently-colonized, now-tame desert setting the only novelty.

“Later on, there were others, but these were the first,” the narrator says. “Well, not really the first. Roxaboxen had always been there, and must have belonged to others, long before.” Here, if we are talking about the human capacity to imagine and see the unseen in a landscape, this is a universal and warming sentiment. If we are thinking about IRL Yuma, Arizona, we must think about who was literally there, on the land (the Cocopah, for one). Marian quickly discovers money: black pebbles in a box buried in the dirt. Black pebbles are cold, hard cash, and Marian has the most.

Houses appear, traced in stones set in squares upon the sand–bigger and bigger. “You could find pieces of pottery for dishes,” the narrator adds helpfully– “round pieces were best.” Whose pottery? This section puzzled me when I was a child, as pottery was not easily located in random patches of land in the working-timber-forest-cum-nature-park near my house–though, as I used sand dollars as plates on the shores of the Salish Sea, I was as unaware of precursors as the pale sailor suits in Cooney’s nostalgic illustrations–which, by the time I saw them, took on a mysterious air in their intentional datedness. Cooney paints like she’s Edward Gorey but pastel: the plasticine forms of the children’s bodies are more about clothes than flesh, and they look doll-like upon the hill.

Marian plants an American flag in her school; what follows is banks, and jail, and commerce, and a sassy little girl named Frances making a house of desert glass. It’s hard, reading, not to want to be Frances, but the following page mingles desolation with abundance: Anna Mae sits in jail for going too fast. There is war: boys versus girls, Girl Scouts versus bandits. Luckily, the only grave in it is for a dead lizard.

Weslandia is one of those books that I talk about with other (American, Scholastic-book-fair-attending) queer friends only to watch a look of dawning, faint, recognition. “Yes! Oh my god!” my friend said, when I was summarizing it at him late at night. “And he makes the new number system based on the flowers’ petals and dresses in the robes! Wow, it’s about being queer!”

Weslandia is definitely a book for gay kids. The lush illustrations of a quiet yet revolutionary garden-based backyard utopia are fascinating and soothing to look at. Wesley looks gently androgynous, bespectacled, even before he dons his long flower-linen robe and a sunhat. The world that emerges from Wesley’s imagination–one of natural fiber decorative tapestries, jungle flowers and even birds and tropical snakes, of quiet nights under a sweet moon while playing the flute– is pretty fucking gay. Although there is, on reflection, something going on here other than that. As Wesley grows his flowers–which do not, unlike those in Little Shop, turn out to be menacing– the ecosystem around him seems to invite in exotic snakes and birds. The instant resurgence of this Amazonian natural lushness as soon as someone even thinks about it, as thought thinking about it alone was a prophecy, is shown in the book’s images to be real rather than the products of imagination–and seems to indicate that there is some local suppression of the natural local ecosystem. Wesley has undermined a disruption in an older order –he is, while inventing a future, also returning to some ancient and more beautiful, if unknown past. Is this the past of Mesopotamian granaries? Something even older, pre-gender, against-power?

But it’s not against power. Weslandia has no critiques for suburbia other than that it makes Wesley personally miserable. If he can make a new social system where nobody has power over him, there are no other visible violences to confront. The book is about imagining liberty as a soft floral child in a homogenous white neighborhood of ticky-tacky boxes, ruled by horrible norms; these are the things that radical faery or Kenneth Anger is born of. Wesley’s imagined liberty is a solitary world that he might rule over and control without parental influence and in defiance of social norms but also without real friends or collaboration, because, in the straight world that conceives of this book, there are no others like him, just one impossible, lonely savant dreaming of domination. The book–unlike other children’s books about revolt– cannot allow outsider children to dream of solidarity, mutual care, of social refuge. And also, the world Wesley can rule, tho homegrown, is tropical. Wesley charges children real american dollars for mosquito repellant made from the flowers’ juice. This text doesn’t mention any technological innovations any other children make. It’s just gorgeous, butchy-femmey androgynous little Wesley inventing everything and bossing people around, and everyone around him being suddenly delighted to obey, even though it means changing their clothes and hair and number system and entire deal so they can adopt his cult. This is how you make a neoliberal gay child with no radical potential. Implicitly, Wesley’s friends all actually as lonely as he was–but he has no insight into that, and no need for it; his will is sufficient. The same note is present in Roxaboxen: the other children succumb, as if by the pressing thumb of nature, to an order dictated by Marian, their mayor, and the social order, which resembles their own– though in the nostalgic fog, even the violence is pretty.

As a second-grader, I enjoyed recognizing this dynamic of play in literature, as it was one of my favorites. I liked it when Mallory told the five other girls in the Talented and Gifted class more facts about the unicorn world our imaginary friends all inhabited. She would also tell us what we were doing on any given day, with an urgency and solemnity that brooked no contest. While we occasionally yes, and’d her into a U-turn– ‘yes I am sick, but the cure is eating this clover’-- it was wonderful to be mediated by the force of another child’s will, and to see what the world was like if someone other than an adult was in charge.

My first faith was an invented one– the religion of invisible animals conjured by my peers. My parents were not religious, my atheist father having been whacked by nuns in grade school and my mother having vague spirituality which amounted to wishing she was more in touch with nature and could breathe more. Neither could deliver spiritual exhilaration other than that related to reading stories aloud to me, or playing me the music that they liked. Mallory, meanwhile, reported to us on the dealings of the Unicorn Council; she told us about the existence of unseen Invisible World things, like Smulfers, who were the unicorns’ enemies. One of the wonderful things about Mallory was her total confidence, like Marian, in delivering her information. If you questioned whether she was talking about reality, she could say to you, with a completely straight face, that she had been able to see her invisible tarantula since the age of two, and he was as real as you or I. Candice, Mallory’s best friend, had a stable of imaginary horses whose names we all had to learn; I resented this slightly more, partly because I felt that horses were far more difficult to take care of than Candice was imagining. I in turn practiced receiving my own revelations, like the one I got from a blue cat named Turquoise: invisible cats had a grocery store under every swimming pool. The mutual worldbuilding became the six or so girls in class’s chief pleasure, and in general, we were good at it. All of the girls in Mrs. Wheeler’s class had some coterie of Invisible Animals, and we drew picture books about them during free-read time and had comprehensive understandings of one another’s relationships to the different creatures. We maybe had such a coherent project together because we were the only six girls in the combined first-and-second-grade class of about twenty-three students, and for complex social reasons, the boys played separately. The Talented and Gifted program was based on opt-in testing, and, shockingly, more boys seemed to be let in than girls. TAG was also, it must be said, mostly white. The social world we created together was one in which we held a lot of power: over publishing, over magic, over the land, over political entities. When the Fairy Cats went to war on the field, we spent a recess productively moving sticks from mud puddle to mud puddle, rescuing survivors. We put the enemy fairy cats in jail; we were four hundred times their size. I knew simultaneously that nobody could see the beautiful world we lived in and knew that it was real. I knew it was real because it made the world more pleasurable to live in.

I remember the precise moment that I got overwhelmed by the responsibility of my commitment to the fantasy: nobody could agree whether: 1) we as real little girls could ride on an Invisible Horse by click-clicking our tongues and galloping, or whether 2) the Invisible Horses were in fact real, and would lift you in the air if you rode them, so the click-clicking was a sign of blasphemic non-belief. To make things worse, Mallory by then had moved into third grade and could not settle the debate.

I can remember suddenly tipping over the edge, the strength of my belief in fairy cats crashing on the rocks of some sturdy material skepticism: you cannot float on an invisible horse. To understand what I was experiencing, I recommend the children’s book Afternoon of the Elves. If I wanted to keep playing, I had to agree to the click-clacking that other children were doing, and I simply did not want to. It seemed dumb. I had made myself believe because of the love of the vision and the harmony of the society, and then I had a faith crisis. I had to either click-clack or leave, and I left. I liked Mallory’s world, but it dissolved without her guidance. I still loved her–admired her– but it wasn’t because she marshalled the unicorns in alien battles. It was because she and I could pretend she had that power together, and she told such good stories about it that it seemed true.

“If there is a history of childhood at all,” Madeline Lane McKinley says in her long essay/short book Solidarity With Children, “it is a history of a property relation, of the idea children can be owned.” In this structure, the stories we give our children–in institutions, in books– tell them about the kinds of possessions we want them to be, the dreams we hope them to dream. Is the process of intergenerational imaginative play exclusively a property relation? I’m not sure. An adult writes Weslandia because they imagine a child who can save themselves from the coercion of suburbia, hoping the child who reads it grows up to think of a utopian solution for our indolent, hateful social structure; through this, the adult presumably hopes to be saved. Alternately, they believe Wesleys, like the Alexander von Humboldts and Frederick the Greats before him, move history on their own polymath wheel, and urge their children to accept these big men’s rule. Can it be both? The fantasy of Roxaboxen is that white settlement continues in mutual agreement (though with gender war) for another generation, and persists in aesthetic appreciation of the land beneath it. The fantasy of Roxaboxen is that women can hold power in America. The fantasies of real children respond to, but also frequently exceed, the concept of the child in the adult’s imagination. Whether by natural biological process or because of socially conditioned irreverance for the pre-adolescent, adults usually forget the strength and power of their own alternate visions of the world when they leave childhood. Children’s literature in the West since the 19th century focuses on recapturing the feeling of the child’s imagination or vision, the child’s simplicity of insight or engaging eccentricity.

These books, and my own experiences, are about small humans asserting our autonomy and power through imaginative play that rewrites reality. They are about small white humans practicing power within an America which simultaneously does everything for us and which still demands of us things we do not want to do–or which we want creative control over. Because while we (child readers) are the heirs of a violent power, when we are children, we are mainly subject to others’ will about what we wear, how we are touched, how we express ourselves, and who possesses us and rules over us. How are we meant to grow into the future like this? I do, for the record, believe that children who aren’t white also play games of pretend-domination and power, of family hierarchy, of world-conquering and domination. All children have less power than adults; all who have a concept of aging are vaguely aware that one day, they might have more power than they do now. Though the world that is prepared for you varies. The practice of play largely concerns what we will do with that power. If we maintain the world in our mothers’ image, like Marian, how do we live long-term with our jails, dead lizards, cars and war?

As an adult, I see more than shades of patriarchal colonialism in Weslandia, with its compliant nature and male-dominated Protestant industry turned toward new seeds from distant lands. Simultaneously, either Weslandia or Roxaboxen kind of scans like the origin story of any old California cult. But Wesley and Marian, when I first read this book as a child, scanned like Mallory to me: visionary, domineering, charismatic and jolly, the harbinger of worlds outside of my parents’ laws. I can grow up loyal to that vision, expecting that queer white savants can save me, or I can learn that the world I grew up in is not the only world, and that success is collaborative, and that patriarchy, racism and supremacy and other power structures are hard to eliminate and keeps working against you as you try to grow your flowers, which you must learn to grow from someone else. When I read Weslandia, I understood how it felt nice to boss others around, and also to be bossed–when operating with totally new rules. It’s pleasant to negotiate with another, to decide they deserve their power and hand it to them. It is also pleasant to think that merely by imagining your power, you can bend all to your will. And then you grow up and find the ways that the social world allows you to exert power.

Is it enough to dream of peaceful worlds, revolutionary or stable, and pass that vision to children?

“We the people of the areas of democratic self-administration– Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Aramaens, Turkmens, Armenians, and Chechens– by our free will have announced this to materialize justice, freedom and democracy in accordance with the principles of ecological balance and equality without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, creed, doctrine or gender.”--The social contract of Rojava, adopted in Jazira, Kobane and Afrin in January 2014, as quoted in Janet Biehl’s Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS, p. 69

Like Jews in the Pale of Settlement, Kurds have a history of persecution under regimes which deny them citizenship, language, right to move around, and identity. Kurds do not have the same history as Jews–no minority is the same as any other– but are also an longstanding ethnic group whose homelands have been bifurcated and administered by sometimes-favorable, sometimes-hostile empires and now nation-states.

Turkish persecution of Kurds was going on in the 1920s, driving many Kurdish groups South and East, where they formed significant minority communities alongside Christian Assyrians, Armenians, Arab Muslims and other groups. Under the Ba’athist Syrian regime, wire borders fenced in Kurds and cut them off from resources, jobs and education, while industry controlled by the regime denied them to advance beyond agrarian economies. In 1962, Kurds were stripped of citizenship, leaving them stateless. While Kurdish nationalism has since then advocated a variety of solutions to this issue, there is a sizeable movement in the intersection of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria for an alternative to nationalism which, like the Bund, can include everyone. And, like Bundism, it finds itself living through both violent defeats and unexpected successes, and in need of international solidarity. It lives in Rojava, or the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES).

Abdullah Öcalan, PKK leader imprisoned in the Sea of Marmara, wrote Democratic Confederalism in prison in 2005, a few years before the Arab Spring uprising. It marks a development in thought from his older interpretations of Kurdish liberation; his tradition is one of Marxism-Leninism, but is now distinct from liberationist movements of the decolonial era that envision decolonized people becoming new nation-states. It’s a decentralized, libertarian socialism. You can read the entirety of his treatise in English at the link above, but the jist of the structure is: local community councils can administer areas democratically, without or within nation-states, as long as equal rights of all people are respected by the larger state structures, and local actors can protect these rights on the local level– though basically, he sees the larger states as unnecessary. Ecological balance, feminism, and antiracism are all key ideas.

During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, ISIS/IS made significant inroads to controlling the majority of Syria. They raped women systematically, killed many civilians, and attempted to implement extreme interpretations of Islamic law which prohibited women from really living public lives, and refused to acknowledge religious diversity. Some 200,000 Syrians have died in this civil war. However, in the vacuum of power left by Assad’s struggle against jihadists, PKK and YPG groups had the opportunity to try to put Öcalan’s ideas into practice in North and Eastern Syria. Author and artist Janet Biehl visited in 2014, just as a handful of liberated cities like Kobane and Afrin had beat back IS militants, and returns to interview people in 2022. What she drafts in her graphic novel is undoubtedly a work of propaganda for the effectiveness, harmoniousness and promise of democratic confederalism– but she provides enough supporting detail to be persuasive that this is a real-world anti-racist movement with the ability to both liberate, rebuild and administer urban and rural areas. The YPG, YPJ and larger SDF fight in egalitarian military units where officers are elected and accountable to their units, and Rojava is administered in a system where every civil post has both a man and woman representative. Biehl talks to people who have found refuge, jobs, community, education and development even in a region torn by war–where libraries of books are dedicated to the dead, and where workers can take home the fruits of their own labor. She speaks to men who recognize women’s equality as innate and unquestionable because of the bravery of female fighters that they personally have witnessed. She observes workers’ cooperatives running restaurants, farms, refuges for women and children fleeing domestic abuse, and diesel distribution hubs, as well as training fighters to defend against both IS and Turkish incursion (the PKK and YPG are classified as terrorist groups by Erdogan, and there are some allegations of allowing IS troops to cross Turkish borders to attack Kurdish towns).

The enormous promise of these cities and farms being run by the people, for the people, with not much in the way of ruling class and with popular distribution of goods for the benefit of everyone the rule, is infectious and seductive. It works, Biehl argues– even in one of the world’s most extreme geopolitical crises! Can this be the model of what could happen during future crises in other places in the world? Can people come together, without leaders, and succeed in producing a peaceful and stable city or town by respecting differences and prioritizing democratic egalitarianism? Will these case studies of democratic confederalism succeed?

It is not 2022 now.

Matthew Petti wrote in 2026 that the Rojava revolution has been crushed through a military campaign by the new Syrian state that attempts to integrate DAANES into the larger government.

“The Kurdish rebels of Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria, promised a type of revolution that had never been done before. Rather than trying to break the country into ethnic states, they would join with their neighbors to decentralize the state from below. And for over a decade, it seemed to work. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) brought together Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, and other militias in a multiethnic, feminist, anarchist-inspired revolution. That dream has come crashing down over the past few days.” –Matthew Petti, Jan 20, 2026, Reason.com

Petti describes the SDF being abandoned by local allies– and the United States– and forced to capitulate to Damascus and al-Sharaa, whose government is accused by Natasha Walter of the Guardian of massacres of Alawites and Druze. In April, Druze factions protested against violations of their rights in several cities. In May, Rojava’s Kurds are protesting against mass detentions of their neighbors by the state. The new Syrian government is not recognizing women’s appointments to government positions long held by women in DAANES/Rojava. Petti discusses how Rojava was forced by the US to take on priorities that were not natural to its goals, such as hunting down IS fighters outside its own territories and occupying Arab-majority cities. Trump’s administration, like Biden and Trump1 and Obama before, does not really care about local democracy or human rights, and the SDF were always a tactical and expedient–and expendable– partner. When the new government came to power in 2024, there was an ultimatum and deadline presented to the independent areas which required compromise. Petti’s read is that SDF leadership chose not to compromise on any territorial claims with the centralized state, lost allied Arab forces to the new state, and so eliminated the possibility of its continued administration. To me, it is unclear to what extent Rojava has actually come under centralized Syrian control. On the upside, al-Sharaa’s government has as of right now recognized Kurdish civil rights and Kurdish as an official language.

As of May, there are protests against the Syrian centralized government in many cities through Rojava, primarily by families of those abducted by the government, as reported by Hawar News. This rhymes with the persecution of radicals in earlier eras, in other places– in the Russian Empire, and in the nationalist states nascent in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.

What solidarity can the people of America offer to people struggling throughout the world for democratic, egalitarian communities? How can we organize to support not only our own working class, but people struggling far away for rights and ways of living that can be a model for our own futures in a world of state collapse and state rupture? The main things I learned reading these two exceptional works of revolutionary and social history is that anti-racism and anti-nationalism will always be the fulcrum on which everything else turns. I want to continue to apply these lessons to my own politics.

“The Western world failed the Jews of Europe when they refused to provide the basic solidarity that the historic moment demanded–the solidarity on which the Bund’s humanism relied. This betrayal allowed Zionism to present itself as the only possible salvation….but Zionism is ethnonationalism. Like all ethnonationalisms, it required mass murder to clear the land to build its dream.”--Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, p. 381

Molly Crabapple is loud, femme, feminist, and not above doing a little mugging for the camera. Her book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which catalogs the efforts of the Jewish Labor Bund from its inception to the end of World War Two, hit the USA Today Bestseller List and New York Times Bestseller List in its first week. It’s a timely book. The Western world’s support for Israel is declining in the wake of its widely broadcast genocide in Gaza and destruction, displacement and pogroms in the West Bank, its unilateral aggression towards surrounding states, and its supporters’ frequent racist tirades or interpersonal violence. It is useful for Jewish people and everyone else to remember that Israel is not the only form of collective organization that Jews have undertaken in the world of the gun, the train and the border.

The Jewish Labor Bund began on October 7, 1897, as a series of book clubs in Vilna, and grew to a trade-union forward party of workers which protected Jews from pogroms, educated young people, taught self-defense classes, attempted a takeover of Odessa, participated in massive strikes and two revolutions, fought against Nazis, and encouraged workers to read, make art, talk to each other, and fight for a better world. Zionists will say: the Bund failed because it trusted too much that goyische allies would express solidarity toward Jews. My answer to this is: Zionism is failing because it refuses to believe in solidarity, or in humanism, at all. If Zionism continues, it will be an increasingly murderous, hierarchical, anti-intellectual, death-centric state, and it will need to wage war on all fronts forever. Such a state, in my opinion, cannot be Jewish in a way that matters— and it also cannot survive long.

Crabapple paid two visits to my Queens-based lay-led antizionist shul in advance of the book’s release to answer questions about the Bund, which was at multiple points in its history the second-largest socialist organization in the Russian Empire (at 35k official members, it was still smaller than today’s American DSA—though its influence throughout society and its range of social priorities much wider). I also attended her talk at Brooklyn Library with Ibtisam Azem, a Palestinian author. In both locations, when I saw her, Crabapple was magnetic, dramatic, and highly animated by narrative and personal stories. In both appearances, she emphasized the toughness, coolness, steadfastness and determination of working-class Bund organizers, often women. Crabapple, a journalist, DSA booster, painter and burlesque artist, has previously illustrated Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham, as well as her own memoir, Drawing Blood, about “the years between 9/11 and the Occupy movement” in NYC.

I am sure there will be a lot of writing about Here Where We Live Is Our Country. I found it a thrilling book to read– structured around a cast of characters like Sophia Dubnova and Henryk Erlich and Pati Kremer and Molly’s own great-grandfather Sam Rothbort, told in small chunks that guide the reader through a very complex period in European/Russian history. It’s foremost a great way of understanding the interconnected world of the late nineteenth century and the extremely enmeshed web of causality between events in Russia/Poland/Lithuania/Ukraine/Geneva and events in NYC. Rather than an academic focus on specific meetings and conferences– though there are scene-setting asides about the Second International that contrast it with early Zionist casino-resort get-togethers, and serious discussion of politics– this book’s focus is on the experiences of workers driven to revolution. There is an infectious enthusiasm about Crabapple’s writing: the adventure of jail, of exile, of teaching others to read, of sex and celebration. The Bundists, unlike the Zionists, developed a vision of the future that was about liberation for everyone, right where they were, rather than evacuation to someone else’s distant shore. As Meyer London, an American Jewish socialist put it, the Bund was looking to “free Egypt”. Enemies–the racist Slavic/Polish/Ukrainian peasantry or industrial peers, even Cossacks– could be converted to allies in a fight against a bigger enemy, and rather than resulting in the abolition of Judaism, the Bund pictured a democratic socialist worker-run state where minority ethnic groups preserved their cultural identity while also achieving education and fulfillment in secular equality. It was a humanist dream that believed in the end of racism alongside the presence of difference, prefiguring later USSR attempts at anticolonial antiracism. While most Bundists were atheists, they were enthusiastic promoters of the Yiddish press, the Yiddish theater, and Jewish life– and they physically defended synagogue-attending neighbors from pogromist attacks. Unlike other socialist tendencies toward the end of Jewish identity and assimilation, the Bund’s force of Jewish labor–confined to the Pale, attacked by cossacks and peasants alike in brutal scenes with body counts higher than American audiences can really comprehend– was committed to recognizing how much Russian/Ukrainian/Polish/British/French/etc antisemitism structured their own lives. They identified with oppressed minority populations all around the world, including Black Americans, whose lynchings at the hands of white racists were often cited as directly comparable both in Yiddish press and in Black papers in the United States. The pogroms that followed the failed 1905 revolution, which the Tsar blamed on Jews, were a wake-up call that far more racism existed than had yet been overcome. “The workers and peasants wacross the Russian Empire wh ‘broke Jewish heads, tore out children’s eyes, raped women..were doing what their fathers and brothers had done in years past…” wrote Simon Dubnov in the wake of these horrors. Some Christian socialists had died defending Jewish homes, but they were “wonderful exceptions to a miserable rule”. Enter Zionists, Jabotinsky, the first Betar– the argument to just give up, to become racist yourself, and use your strength on someone who does not yet have enough weapons to fight back. Also enter the Bolsheviks– and the argument that all petty difference would be subsumed if you had a strong enough unified state.

One thing that stands out decisively in this book is Crabapple’s anti-Lenin bent. To be fair, Lenin started it– his anti-Bundism appears early, in 1903. Lenin’s line was mainly that the Bundists were confused about their assertion of a need for independence based on ethnic specificity, which Lenin equated with their enemy Zionism and which he said obscured that “every point in the programme is common to the entire proletariat”--a point lost on some racists in Hlukhiv a couple decades later. Crabapple (I think this is fair to say) personally dislikes this Lenin a lot, but in her account she recognizes the reasons for Bolshevik success in the wake of the first World War: people were sick of fighting and dying far from home, had done the March revolution for the bread, and the Bolsheviks proposed a more dramatic social reorganization than the one initially tried out under the Provisional Government. Simultaneously, she sees Lenin and co. as coldly pragmatic/opportunistic, historically contingent bullies. They were, she contends, happy to write off the wellbeing of the most oppressed–agrarian peasants affiliated with the SRs, Jews– in order to consolidate power (and grain), and were too eager to maintain state control over Russian imperial lands that would just as soon have become independent. What was the alternative? Maybe a weaker country–maybe a series of bites taken off the edges of Russian territory leading to collapse. You see the dilemma: is it about local worker control, or wanting greater state power capable of keeping capitalists and nationalists out? Bundist critics like Henryk Erlich characterized the October Revolution, which abolished the Provisional Government, as an autocratic putsch, rather than a workers’ uprising. Erlich suggested that if autocratic tendencies continued in this vein, in a few years Bolsheviks would soon turn on each other.

Crabapple is coming at this from a certain point of view rooted in a fundamental disagreement with anything that overrides participatory democracy: her protagonists, who had been fighting against the Tsar longer than Lenin, both with and without other socialists, found themselves sometimes imprisoned and killed by the revolutionary Red Army and sometimes protected by it. To the Bolsheviks’ credit, they killed fewer Jews than Ukrainians and White Russians– only 9% of pogroms during this period were Communist-run. But it was still a disappointing turn. The Bund had tried for twenty years before the Bolshevik takeover of the Kremlin to bring about an anti-racist secular, socialist and democratic workers’ state; they sided with Mensheviks out of an impulse to preserve minority concerns rather than emphasize a single party line–which turned out to be their undoing, along with (whoops) supporting their empire of origin in the first World War alongside other non-communist socialist parties. While a late resolution switched the Bundists to pro-pacifism, it didn’t come quickly enough, and nascent fascist nationalisms quickly smeared all Jews as Bolsheviks just as Bolsheviks smeared Bundists as class traitors. Some Bundists became Bolsheviks; some of these communists were later purged, alongside unlucky SRs. I think Crabapple has a fundamental point about the flaws in the Bolshevik approach. If you alienate and persecute your left rivals rather than keeping them around to argue with, the resulting unity of thought in statecraft may be good for a few years’ industrial growth, but longterm will not be as flexible as it needs to be, and may not be able to handle future expressions of democratic dissent–or economic/military issues– without cracks or spasms. Simultaneously, Crabapple highlights the moments in 1903 and 1917 where the Bund walked away from the table and ceded power rather than make ideological compromises in order to effect a workers’ state, and the vicious fights between Bundist and Communist adherents in the streets of Kovno, Minsk, Lublin et cetera that prevented solidarity against fascists until it was too late. The USSR, on the theory of buying time, endorsed initial expansionism from Hitler before turning against it after Hitler turned on Poland. Bundism held the Nazis out of Warsaw, but could not save the people of the ghetto without much greater solidarity, refugee assistance, and direct aid from abroad. I enjoy the ability of Here Where We Live’s bird’s eye view to contextualize the individual memoirs of survival that often trickle down to us through time. Those Polish Jews who did flee into the USSR, like young Uri Shulevitz, often found themselves abandoned with no resources in places like Turkestan–and were motivated to commit crimes for Zionism later. This was the failure of international anti-fascist solidarity in the United States, Britain, France, Canada, USSR, etc, as much as it was any failure on the part of Bundists. This is a story about the failures of both Bolshevism and Bundism to build lasting coalitions with left rivals that come through in times of need– of humans capable of heroism who are undermined by the racism, factionalism or particular vendettas that turn allies against each other.

As much as all this politicking, Molly cares about affect. Emotions like despair, desire, love, and ecstasy characterise these workers’ movements just as much as revolutionary seriousness, and the kind of party she feels nostalgic about and dreams of rematerializing in the future is one of costume balls, book clubs, communal childcare, and sex, where young people are encouraged to participate and where women as well as men lead fulfilled lives. She occasionally brings in her own experiences as a young artist in NYC alongside her great-grandfather’s, contrasting their experience of the built environment, discussing the kinds of art her grandfather made for Americans versus the kind of Expressionist daring being tried out in Berlin, and thinking about the meaning of poetry in the lives of people who also handled guns. Bernard Goldstein, a unionist bruiser with a reputation as someone who could break kneecaps if needed, also loved children and theater. Pati Kremer once dated Jabotinsky. A young woman in the Warsaw Ghetto wanted to fuck her boyfriend before they both died fighting Nazis. These human stories are tearjerkers, and I think will get a lot more people invested in socialism than stories of Great Men or Economic Machines alone. A yarn is good for something. Humans connect to humans.

One of the things I most hope this book does is provide a good argument for returning Jewish political energy to projects against Zionism. All through this text, we see a litany of elders calling forward into the future that any project that hinges on nationalism, xenophobia, land theft or massacre is not only wrong but doomed. It is wrong because you should not do to other people what you do not want done to you– and it is doomed because you make an enemy every time you strike someone down just because you see them as Other and want to extract their labor or for them to cease existing. The more enemies you make, the more you will find yourself at war, never free and never at peace. The Bund, alongside other anarchists and communists and socialists of a million micro-persuasions, saw a way to end the cycle of conflict, of struggle, of exploitation: freedom for all workers, equality between all ethnic groups and between men and women, mass education, and common ownership of the means of production. This was an impossible dream when they conceived of it in 1897; for a moment, it looked far less than impossible. And while the Nazis could kill millions and instill a belief in both Jews and Germans that living in a multicultural world was impossible, they could not kill the Bund’s dream. The Bund’s vision was composed of its thousands of members, who carried that idea into other work they did later, if they survived the Holocaust: Dubnova became a Civil Rights activist in her later years. Sam Rothbort, who played a pretty small part in the Bund’s work, all told, carried this dream to America; his belief in art, antiracism and dignity was transmitted to his acceptance of his Puerto Rican son-in-law, and Molly is now a socialist too, whose art she sees as in conversation with her ancestor.

Academics may sniff at the love/lust/drama of it all, but it’s sexy, and relatable, and it sells, and this is just how Crabapple writes about war, revolution and death. She wants revolutionary popular history to be accessible and compelling. Her earlier work on Brothers of the Gun, unlike more academic accounts of the Syrian civil war, focuses on interpersonal relationships and the motivations and emotional connections of people driven to participate in armed movements.

Marwan Hisham says of the collaborative memoir in this interview from Bomb magazine:

“I think it’s important to show the interested reader outside of Syria how wars affect people and what it means to live in a situation like that. We’re also in a kind of rhetoric war, and it’s important to shed light on things that are completely neglected, to fight stereotypes and try to show people the complicated reality. Because it’s not a normal situation, it’s an extraordinary experience and I’ve experienced many things in a very short time, I felt I was obligated to convey the story, and the written form is the best way for me. I wanted to portray people who had their own political views, their own understandings of life, and who changed over time. They were people just like other people in other countries. Their environment was probably different, but they’re still complicated people. There are no simple people.”

The conflicts of the past are not identical to the conflicts today, but the people within them–who tend toward poetry, pacifism, militant combat, education, all at once or in sequence or in tension– are human. Time connects us to past struggles, and the struggles of today are born out of the failures of past struggles. Ukrainian nationalism and neo-nazism–as well as modern Russian imperial territorial aims– directly springs from the limits and failures of Bolshevism, and the techniques of war at play today–along with the heartbreak and pain of losing loved ones to torture, massacre, or misguided chauvinism– are shared by people in the past. We relate to them through the stories of their lives, not just the records of number-dead or battles-lost-and-won. Crabapple’s own history of journalism around the Arab Spring and its Syrian aftermath–though she herself has only been to Syria once, and has been more often in Lebanon and Palestine– draws the connection for me to another book I read in tandem with Here Where We Live Is Our Country. That book is the 2022 graphic novel Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on Isis by Janet Biehl from PM Press. What struck me most about reading these texts together was the extent to which they are about a very similar impulse, a century apart. I am going to talk about that book in my next post.

I wanted to write about two books in conversation. The books are: A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton and Eden II by K. Wroten. One is a lesbian trans novel about the recovery of childhood and the unrealized creation of utopia; the other is a trans graphic novel about a transmasc trying to build a perfect escapist game where the realization of Self is utopic, and instead producing the world’s destruction/salvation. The themes relate to what I’ve been writing about here re: AI, information, and digital experiences. Thank goodness Metaverse is over. Both are trans books about trans people making video games where the video games seem to encompass the whole world– or the whole world that matters. Both are about trans people trying to control the real world while recalling or producing a synthetic one using theory and elaborate structures which may inhibit contact, but which also protect them. And both are by comics artists– though Jeanne’s first full-length graphic novel, about a tarot card reader in space, is, I understand, still forthcoming.

When A/S/L came out, I was pleased to discover that it is a novel about video games that is more about the power of a myth, and the power of a role. It means that it is a novel that a non-video-game player can read. What I love about Jeanne’s books is that they are all about very weird, deep women connected to stories and culture. While the trans women in her trans novels do worry about being misperceived, harmed and misunderstood by cisgender people, their primary concern is not to reflect, in front of the reader-audience, on how they are exterior to cis womanhood; rather, she usually has a collection of girls split somewhere between manic insanity, pragmatic self-protective survival, and serious devotion to sorcery and art. Sometimes it is terrible to read books about artists, but I like Jeanne’s, because she writes from the perspective of someone who believes that art is a serious social responsibility that can have devastating consequences if mis-used.

I am personally frustrated by the lack of critical, engaged reviews of Eden II, a vast graphic novel written and drawn by Wroten and put out by Fantagraphics in August 2023. ComicsBeat has one of the most comprehensive ones, but despite its many words, it boils down to: it’s clever, it’s about theology and the Self, and the pictures look good. The book is huge when you lift it in your hands. It is an album rather than a book; it is printed on nice paper, has a weird plastic cover, and feels hefty as a cinderblock. It is so big that I suspect the reviewer from Library Journal did not read all of it:

“ The quest of 53 to transcend his absurdly unfulfilling existence finds him interacting with an intricately interconnected ensemble, many of whom go on to serve as point-of-view characters at various points in this kaleidoscopic epic. All of their stories, however, somehow connect back to that of 53’s housemate, Ellis Flowers, and what happens when his design for an immersive virtual reality game is stolen by a major corporation that wants to control how everyone perceives everything, all the time.

VERDICT An ambitious, skillfully crafted satire of art, philosophy, and modern ennui.”

This review, in its non-comics-head engagement with what amounts to the first few pages, rushes the summary of the central plot, which is that Ellis (who uses they/them), in reaction to ennui and internal pain and maybe a bit of a rotten crush on a hot femme housemate, engineers a promising virtual reality where anything is possible– only to have it stolen by a stubbly professor who sells it to a wicked corporation, who use it to attempt to control everyone. The housemates, together with the professor’s genius five-year-old daughter and, eventually, the regretful, alcoholic professor himself, then attempt to wrest control of the game and the world back from the corporation. They remove corporate control of the game and then vanish into it; the world outside the game then dies. I am not sure if Wroten would agree with me, but it seems thematically linked to The Chronicles of Narnia’s final book, The Last Battle, where virtue is tested against satanic evil before yeeting everyone good into a healed world where their bodies no longer matter. Wroten seems to struggle with feeling self-critical about yearning for utopic innocence in their three published works: Cannonball is about a mean dyke who writes sugary YA fiction, and Everyone Sux But U returns with a nostalgic uneasy glow to a dysfunctional relationship with a fellow queer teen who seems to have a cluster B personality disorder–the nostalgia-glow critiqued but not dispelled by Wroten’s treatment. There are many humorous, skillful and erratic digressions along the way in Eden II: the use of color is limited, but effective, and sharp contrast and simple character design moves the eye along. However, the book’s ponderous length, considerable philosophical bent, many characters, and loose structure seem to have inhibited readers seeking its message.

Wroten, who assembled this massive tome while in lockdown, says that the book’s many plot twists and turns were not planned.

“When I started writing Eden II I was really obsessing over the ability of synthetic/replicated experience to be preferable to real/authentic experience. For instance, I believe at the time I was playing The Sims a lot, and I was creating versions of close relationships I had IRL in the game, and then trying to make them as immersive as possible. The thought of just texting that person and asking to hang out was not the point. It didn’t satisfy whatever I was trying to achieve.”

While the IRL characters in Eden do connect IRL, they also use technology to move beyond inhibitions and Freudian arcs they’ve carried with them their whole lives, and then move forward past the digital veil and the problems of perception without the reader. I struggle with Eden II because it disappoints my desire for a material plan for a healed world other than “produce an alternate reality where none of our mistakes in this one matter”. The lovable, evil professor dies in self-sacrifice; we don’t have to reckon with him. Nobody needs to figure out how to navigate the limits of perception in the material realm, and no one ever will again. This seems impossibly lonely– its prioritization of self-exploration removes the possibility-necessity of relating to real people in a true way, or of understanding people across the world from you whose labor makes your life possible. When I initially read it, I concluded that Fantagraphics’ indie edgy dude culture or editing had brought out the basic nihilist strain in Wroten. The power of critique of current internet trends hits: if Wroten so chose, they could make a living primarily as a satirist, and their imagination re: creative distortion seems bottomless. Simultaneously, they hit these punches with a kind of abject despair.

Meanwhile, A/S/L, my favorite trans novel of the last couple years, is about trans girls in online game design communities in the 1990s who are all psychically indebted to the character of the Sorceress from the popular Mystic Knights video game series (which is and is not Final Fantasy). Thornton deals with similar but distinct themes as Wroten: three girls circa ‘90s attempt to create a video game where they can both be their real selves and save the world through the power of community. Its themes connect to Thornton’s Black Emerald, which is about how harsh-tongued indie comics have uneasy powers over real life, or Summer Fun, which is about how music, produced by its circumstances, produces new realities. The teens are mean to each other on online message boards, yet all three glow with a kind of mystic power you just burn to see realized. Unlike Eden II, where the video game can spasmodically stretch, ignoring material constraints, to cover all of reality, the video game in A/S/L lies underneath, a superstructure, a narrative, an arcana guiding these women’s lives, just as real– the moments where it peeks through as possibility are goosebump-raising. They cannot perceive this structure except in doubtful glimpses– it is both inside and outside them, showing us, the reader, that there is something connecting perception beyond the shadows anyone individually sees on their own wall. The shadows are shared– a reality exists that affects us whether or not we understand it. Jeanne Thornton is the best at writing teenagers and I think she is one of the greatest at writing sorcery, magic, invocation and dreams. Wroten seems to shine most when writing about dyads, mangled-frustrated romantic desire, the darkness of small children, and the indignant hope for total future purity which can still exist at the bottom of a pit.

In Eden II, the stoner painter roommate asks: “Do you agree with Schopenhauer? That life and dreams are pages from the same book read in a different order?” Both books seem to be about subconscious, about narrative that we produce in our own lives because of an attachment to it. Perhaps this is more important for trans people, whose orientation towards reality must trust in their own perception— of themselves, of gendered systems. In A/S/L, you glance up at some point to realize that your dreams are structured by stories you wrote as a child in response to a video game, and the stories are now the story of your life. Like the girls in A/S/L, people in Eden II are drawn to the virtual world because of its promise to restore something to them that they have lost.

Additionally, the books both show trans people constructing from first principles a kind of digital Christian proto-communism– Norwood Abbey operating in a nonchristian but DnD style fantasy world, serving the wastelands of a devastated fictional landscape, and Ellis’s Eden II attempting to recover lost innocence for the people inhabiting a devastated reality and free that reality from the chains of capital. After, of course, Ellis builds this:

One thing I find myself mainly thinking is that Thornton’s Sash and Wroten’s Ellis would have a lot of very intense, unhappy conversations with one another that might not result in anything beautiful being built but would reveal in each serious, judgemental soul a respect for the other. But Ellis seems to have trouble relating to women in general. With their stern, repressed manner, they have difficulty articulating their lust or need; their nonbinary boy-adjacent, dyke-adjacent passivity and bitterness around their solitude alternates between being sympathetic and uneasy. Their inability to penetrate the interiority of the women they pursue sometimes feels absurd; it feels that the narrative demands that everyone else pay attention to Ellis, to relate to their very special birthday boy problems, even as Ellis themself self-denigrates and withdraws, hoping to be pursued. It’s kind of a darksided Stone Butch situation, with a masc bemoaning how little they’re known. As an aside, Leslie Feinberg clearly thought about virtual realities as well: there’s a whole passage in Drag King Dreams about the inability to create a perfect utopic virtual self in a MMORPG, and the necessity of being recognized by femmes online.

A/S/L is about lesbianism too, but none of the women in it are finding much useful female community– this is a far cry from Kai Cheng Thom’s vision of street-girl solidarity in Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars; these are alienated downwardly mobile middle-class white trans women whose connections fracture once they lose the shared condition of being teens trapped in a forum together. Solemn Sash, once a bossy, serious teenager who cared about the game more than anyone and felt it had real potential to change her life/everyone’s life, has in adulthood become a dominatrix who works with men and lives with her parents, but her lack of patience for bullshit or absence of vision means that the business side of her business challenges her, and she has limited contact with trans friends. Sash’s good friend checks in on her periodically, always worried; Sash is unable to articulate how much she appreciates her, and we read that friendship with her requires patience and good faith. Survival-mode people-pleaser Lilith, whose online moniker has become her real identity, works at a bank, turning down or approving loan applications as an irrepressible machine-part, while enduring come-ons from her boss. Her gaggle of trans woman friends from support group leans conservative, slightly racist, and judgemental; meanwhile, she has a situationship going with a particularly mean sadist/dom trans girl her age who looks down on her even while sexually satisfying her. Abraxa, never dominated, and never in doubt about her identity, has rocketed meanwhile from one unstable life situation to the next, and after accompanying a straight couple on an abortive sailboat trip, she crashes with a trans friend in Jersey, overstays her welcome, and then finds the abandoned, burned-out church that will become the subject of an intense psychosis which might also contain real magic.

The form of the triangle is a powerful one for magic--and for drama-- and the relationships in A/S/L between three trans girls closeted to various degrees, in various ways, serves as the wheel spinning in this plot. It manages to feel organic and ancient in structure. While having never met in person, the girls spent a large section of the 1990s talking, and planning the levels of their game, in which a powerful sorceress will resurrect Norwood Abbey as a thriving center of art, magic, and community in a devastated wasteland. They spent even more hours thinking about each other since. Their dreams foundered on the rocks of romantic and sexual mutual awareness between Lilith and Sash, and were ultimately terminated by Lilith being sent to Boy Scout Camp, where she was unable to rise to the magic call against the pressures to conform–at least for a few more years. Everyone, temporarily, lost touch. The triangle-form broke and the energy was dissipated, but pulls on its corners like a magnet. The heartbreak they all carry from this is a lodestone.

In Eden II, the powerful shapes center on the Christian: the devil, the apple, the cross-shaped torture device for a martyr– though I can’t figure out if there is a trinity anywhere, or a kind of individuated God Of Self. The relational dynamics between characters seem to fall into that of the dyadic: romantic interests, rival/rival, fan/celebrity, father/child, teacher/student, ad/viewer, boss/employee. The egalitarian relationship between roommates and that between industrial workers (the latter appears only briefly) is the one promise of redemption. I am fascinated by this, and wonder if the heart of what I don’t understand about the book lies in these rare moments of equal, tentative contact between peers.

Eden II and A/S/L both deal with the problem of alienation of labor. The worlds around them are splitting apart: in A/S/L, the initial Trump election looms and then happens, shattering Lilith’s liberal dreams, and in Eden II, air itself is in short supply, while infrastructure all around crumbles and breaks and toxic workplaces bleed into personal life. Eden treats larger-than-life apocalyptica as a given: a family of circus performers, a room of game developers with real horns– but it is grounded in the problems of ecological destruction and capitalism. Money is a problem for all of the characters– in Eden II, Spider burns her uniform after quitting a factory job with an abusive boss, while in A/S/L, Lilith rebuffs the pathetic sexual advances of her boss while navigating the arcane strict rules of Bank and Sasha pretends to be more stable than she is as she depends on just one New Jersey trick to pay her parents rent, while Abraxa is homeless because of being unable to hold a job. The word “capitalism” is used in both books, but in both, collective action markedly fails to materialize. The primary relationship is between individuals, and individuals are self-contained, with contact nearly always disastrous. I perceive the difference as being in tone.

In A/S/L, the motion of the characters happens as if forces beyond them are acting on them. Like in a Diana Wynne Jones novel, you only know it is magic because it works on you. Moved by dreams from childhood, but caught in unconsummated ripples. Sash and Lilith are vulnerable when Abraxa manages to make contact and reveals she has been squatting at the abandoned church, which she is trying to turn into a real Norwood Abbey, like in their childhood game. Just when it seems that dreams from another realm might really break through into our world though, there are failures of communication, of cooperation, which prevent the vision from emerging; there are feelings of betrayal about the structure of their triangle. This might be the most heartbreaking thing in the whole world, but the world does not end.

In Eden II: the false promise of the corporate game is broken, but the game does not end. I really need other people’s writing about this book, because–I admit– I do not fully grasp its promise or premise. It seems to be doing something similar to Doctorow’s vision of AI in Walkaway, a singularity where digital consciousness upload releases all of us from any attempt to control or subordinate us– where access to code, to a world that can be described completely in mathematical terms, frees us. And changes us. There seems to be a kind of thing where we go from being animal to being human to– in the digital– being divine.

Again, I struggle with this idea. I believe we are inevitably tethered to the material (games run on servers), and any attempt to transcend directly into Godhead using human-created tech without some explanation of the mechanics fails to move me. Additionally, the moral movement of Eden II seems to be that we recognize our devastating individual sin as socially constructed and then abandon responsibility for it– and while I think most sins are socially constructed, acts of harm are objectively real insofar as individual lives exist. Our sins are collective, solid, like our trash, unevenly distributed; the harm we have done other people and other creatures is real. We cannot abandon Earth for the stars or the servers while in the real world, life dies on the Earth left behind. Christianity’s salvation basically fails to move me, I guess. The redeeming qualities of Wroten’s text are its absolutely chock-full overflow bucket of ideas, its insightful satire of our period’s truly evil people, its interest in the psychically lost, its hot intriguing women, its fistfights and gunfights, and its frequent admissions that it is in relations between real consciousnesses, not mediated ideas, where meaning is born.

A/S/L seems more wiccan/pagan in its outlook than Wroten, opening the doors to infinite entities which might have access to you through the stories you tell about yourself. It has MORE than you have yet seen in most books about what it feels like to love someone you have never met, to need them, to be unable to explain threads from your past which are tied up in the magic spell another teenager cast on you through the computer. Like many novels, it doesn’t have answers for revolution–here I question if any novel can produce revolution rather than slow it– but it encourages catharsis, contact, care, and empathy, and it seems not to rule out change–though that change remains beyond the veil drawn across our lives by heartbreak. Abraxa, in her multidimensional consciousness, is both a homeless woman experiencing insane visions and a visionary whose reality is not ready for this world, in a way that feels the most true to me of anything I have read about a crazy friend. The way her visions are the same as those of a businesslike cis woman who wants to start a community center, but different, is also highlighted. There is at the heart of the book a promise: if a few more things fell into place, it would be possible to build Norwood Abbey. Perhaps another playthrough would get to it. Jeanne writes sadness with the solidity of someone who believes in happiness. Lilith too, having experienced magic at the digital hands of Sash as a teenager and since at the hands of various good and bad trans girlfriends, tries to protect the possibility of better things coming, while living among many women who have accepted a certain degree of misery. Sash longs for more contact, but despite internal desire and decisiveness, she behaves in ways that others find erratic and untrustworthy-- the reactions of the world at large to our central women are an expert exploration of what transmisogyny actually looks like in queer spaces, while also lingering on the moments where our central characters fail themselves and each other. This sounds more pat than it actually is in the book. I was on the edge of my seat in so many interactions. No book has ever made a loan underwriter’s actions so exciting.

The sorceress figurine falls off the shelf: your best friend named you and vanished. What would you do with the magic residue left behind? Where can you find safety in this dark world? And who will build the levels?

I am a librarian, as anyone who has talked to me at any party for any length of time has learned. I’ve written about librarians in media before. I had this essay about The Music Man’s Marian the Librarian as representative of a sensitive, slightly socially unacceptable worldly white woman whose old-world culture combined with a humble Iowan dream of matrimony + civic service is necessary for the taming of the American frontier. Through her awareness of her own slightly tragic role, Marian eventually binds the chaotic, criminal masculine principle to civic service. Mo from Dykes To Watch Out For is more superficially aspirational: she’s attuned to the privacy violations embedded in the Patriot Act and, once she finishes library school (which she finds almost unbearably erotic), she is presumably acquiring radical nonfiction and lesbian literature on the public dollar. However, she is also fundamentally a do-nothing radical whose principles slip and slide; she never fights for anything. Can a librarian fight?

Today I will be talking about another fictional librarian with a truly insane outsize impact on my future gender, career path and self image: Library Lil by Suzanne Williams and Steven Kellogg

From its cover, Library Lil appears to be a feminist tract—women are strong! Women are powerful! In fact, it’s a postfeminist fable: like a stubborn Grimms Brothers’ protagonist, hyperlexic Lil’s main role is to work her ass off and become a singular superhuman hero of literacy, with no apparent institutional backing. Her efforts pay off in the increased literacy of her town–and in her eventual matrimonial commitment to a baby-faced motorcyclist.

I grew up in the early 2000s, when large celebrity posters insisting we READ were nearly as common as large posters with celebrities asking if we got milk. This was also, coincidentally, the era of Harry Potter, Borders/B&N, and the death of the small bookstore.

Into this realm came Library Lil.

Library Lil is a superhero of the 1990s. She is very strong, from reading all the encyclopedias in the library at a young age. When she grows up, she of course becomes a librarian, butchly painting the sign on a presumably un-fixed-up Carnegie-esque building. She, like Kellogg’s previous picture-book Paul Bunyan, is both an adult woman and somewhat baby-faced, as is everyone in her universe. What exactly has happened between her own childhood and the present is unclear, but in adulthood she is her town’s only librarian (and apparently the only worker at all in the building), and there’s a much bigger problem: nobody in her town reads at all.

I had not yet read Matilda, which also features a library super-user with a preternatural reading ability. I was compelled by Lil’s clear love of reading, which I was discovering with both books marketed towards my own age group and those intended for children much older. I loved stories of adventure, overcoming injustice, and, particularly, gender-nonconforming girls. I liked believing I might be strong.

Things were different then: the literacy decline was treated as a national crisis by political figures on both the left and right, who generally blamed each other but uniformly advocated for increased public spending on early literacy (in 2026, Republicans are threatening billions in K-12 cuts). TV time, rather than phone time, was the concern, and America’s place on the world stage was threatened by its apparent inability to educate its children. Blockbuster bestsellers seemed to be the best remedy for a youth population otherwise disinterested in literature. My mother worked for a literacy nonprofit, created around the year 2000. It was one of many initiatives floating around the zeitgeist at this time in reaction to stagnating literacy scores among elementary-school children in the 1990s, particularly in neighborhoods and cities where there had been significant cuts to school funding or education investment.

The policy solutions varied: the Ready to Learn grant to CBS/PBS and other public television in 1995 supported the creation of public television for children oriented around literacy, like Dragon Tales and Between the Lions. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 introduced standards-based testing to measure achievement, with punishment for schools (in mostly poor, racialized areas) which failed to raise literacy scores. First Lady Laura Bush advocated reading with children, publicly spoke for better training for early elementary teachers, and presented at conferences on early literacy. All of this literacy buzz coincided with a renewed interest in children’s spaces in libraries and updating them to be pleasant and welcoming. Growth in public library use from 1995 to 2009 was accompanied by an increase in library expenditures. Most funding increase for libraries happened at the local level (since, you know, federal spending needed to be spent on the military)-- but it made a measurable difference. By the late 1990s, the declining literacy rate was turning around. The causes of this were ultimately complex: falling crime and declining childhood poverty were probably part of it, though having a cultural bipartisan focus on literacy and an increase of 42% in federal funding for public schools can’t have hurt. Alongside teachers, librarians were championed as the heroes pulling America out of its crisis.

The myth of the librarian in American society is a very feminized myth– the idea of a civilizing, educated force diligently, virtuously, sternly and apolitically rearing a reading public which can mellow or mediate the rough, masculine forces of chaos and demagoguery (or the racialized force of the mob or the immigrant). Library Lil is functionally just an update, its bipartisan appeal maximized by its narrative’s fundamental conservatism. Lil’s super-strength is matched only by her condescension for her non-reading neighbors and her enthusiasm and faith in the written word’s power. Like a saint guiding a boat in a storm, she single-handedly pilots a broken bookmobile through a town damaged by wind and rain, using the crisis to reroute her fellow man’s neural pathways toward storytelling.

This kind of action is precisely what library management, library boards and members of Congress like to imagine a librarian doing with their limited budget. As someone who has the experience of being on a bookmobile when the engine started to smell like rotten eggs, I must say that in reality it’s very hard to do bookmobile service without functional vehicles. Likewise, in the crisis of the early pandemic, there was simultaneously a demand that we do far more professional development, outdoor outreach, and online programming than we ever had before, even as the pandemic hit us as essential workers– my union steward mentioned that during the year 2020, she had attended 46 funerals in the Bronx. In Lil’s world, she perhaps does not realize she is drastically overworked: she has no coworkers to compare notes with, in contrast to the librarians of yore on the first page of the book, who at least have each other to talk to.

Back to Lil’s effect on her town. This reading is a family activity–unthreatening, centered on children–but the adults of the town end up reading more too, and their habits suddenly put them at odds with out-of-towners who favor pro-wrestling. When they discover the bar doesn’t have a TV, they get so mad that they prepare to confront Lil about her bibliomania.

Here is where I admit that I read this book all the time as a child, and where I admit that the dumb motorcyclists had a certain apparel for me and remain embedded somewhere in my gay psyche. They’re an attempt to make the biker into a plausible children’s book character and separate them from real violence, but a bat’s squeak of sexuality lingers–looking at them now, with their hairless babyfaces, awkwardly pouchy non-phallic crotches, and a brand-free fashion sense someplace between Grease and a rumpled, chubby Tom of Finland, they …kind of look like butch dykes or tboys. When I was a kid I had no point of comparison, but I enjoyed the promise that through both violence and coercion I could make boys read books with me. Lil tosses and destroys all the bikes–tragic, for children who picked up this tome for the motorcycle on the cover— and, afterward, the bikers become meek children before her. Bill, now devoid of a form of transportation and unable to leave, becomes her employee and spouse. In turn, Lil watches wrestling sometimes. If I do imagine Bill as a masc/butch, I can almost get behind it, but we’re back to that old assimilation problem, and the problem of library politics.

This is the bipartisan consensus of the ‘90s on the role of libraries and librarians. Lil does not read books and fly off on a motorbike, becoming the fantasy hero of her childhood stories, and she does not fight for or have a union. She does not examine the structural issues of consumer capitalism, poverty, or racism in her community that might stop people from using their library. Instead, she marries and reproduces institutions. She doesn’t encourage her community to vote or otherwise mobilize, or offer workshops on technology–though her library has computers. Instead, her role is to be a silly powerhouse of a storyteller whose singular strength, judginess and virtue is its own advertisement for reading. Don’t you just #lovebooks? After six and a half years as a children’s librarian, I see myself in her silly hat, her neutered, childlike face beaming a smile, promising not to threaten any structures. Her shadow is still carried in my genderqueer librarian body.

Under Bush/Clinton, when everyone agreed that literacy was important, it was a tame literacy, not a critical or political one, that left and right alike endorsed. This story, where all heroes are white and all multiracial children fade into the background, ties in with the white face of librarianship, and it also helps frame why libraries are under attack now, after attempts in the 2010s to push for diversity, improve civics education and host critical discussions on new technology, make Internet access equitable, and god-forbid allow queer people to read to children gained traction.

Today, literacy rates are once again sliding, with some measures putting child reading scores back where they were around 1992. Personally, I can observe that there might be a few causes to this:

• Stats show parents aren’t reading with children, which has major consequences on vocab.

• There is a real literacy consequence for pandemic-era online learning, because of less interactivity and more pressure placed on teachers in distance or hybrid classrooms

• kids whose introduction to reading coincides with a large amount of short-form videos or high-motion screen-based games may have trouble with the attention span necessary for reading. Large amounts of screen time used for video games or TV is associated with lower reading scores– and I suspect that children with more overworked parents are more likely to be using screens more.

• There is less silent reading time in schools, and a dependence on short excerpts over longer, more challenging texts blunts children’s attention span and analysis.

Idriis Kahloon over at The Atlantic argues that it is not chronic disinvestment in public schools, the pandemic’s interruptions, or increases in child poverty or homelessness that reduces literacy–nope, that’s silly, it’s fundamentally lack of “high expectations” for children. He also blames those damn phones, and also mismanagement of pandemic relief funds and school funds in general towards things that don’t help children. I’m going to straightforwardly agree with him on the phone point: having a distracting screen you can watch videos/monitor your peers on simply limits how much attention any of us have for anything else. I think schools should try suing Meta next.

On his other points, I want to offer some perspective. He argues that schools spent pandemic money on silly things like HVAC instead of tutors for kids. Schools (counter to Mr Khaloon’s argument) did spend pandemic money on necessary building upgrades like HVAC systems and repairs; they also hired a loooot of staff. I’d like to point out that a whopping 65% of 200,000 positions added during the pandemic-funding era were support staff like counselors, coordinators, interventionists, and coaches, and I am sure some of them have been doing good work. However, I think that there might be some truth in this latter point, insofar as there was not a significant increase the number of full-time classroom teachers/librarians. This was probably due to the short-term nature of the dollars. The staffing of schools and their classrooms/libraries has a significant impact in what can happen in those spaces. While 88% of public schools have a library, not all of those libraries have librarians inside. Without a staff member to tell children and teachers about the resources available for their learning (or collections management), a library may serve as a room whose books remain mysterious to all. Furthermore, only 52% of charter schools have a library, despite receiving public dollars.

Kahloon tries to rally us around the old flag of no child left behind– stringent state testing standards and punitive measures for schools with low scores. But I think that this policy appeared successful because it coincided with a culture-wide focus on reading and broad increases in school funding for teachers. Kahloon seems against increasing funding for schools on anything, just being stricter, but studies in the 1990s showed real benefits to reduction in class sizes.

The real question is how to rebuild civic trust in multiracial democracy dependent on public education. In order to have informed citizens who exert real pressure on their representatives or on the billionaires who pocket a majority of the country’s GDP, people need to know how to read. Librarians–and indeed, reading– are fundamentally something that only exists when there are institutions built around the maintenance of literature, knowledge and literacy. That culture is built in the classroom, but institutions like libraries that families can access on their own time help kids see that reading connects them to the world, to other children, and to their family. They also help teenagers feel like independent social actors, and they help adults research citizenship, practice new languages, find cookbooks and comics, master 3D printing, and knit. And to do all that, you need more than one woman.

On that note: the NYC library preliminary budget was disappointing, though it came from a socialist mayor. The City Council gave us back the 30 million that big Z threatened to cut as his strategic method for pressuring Hochul to tax the rich; next we will see if the adopted budget grants us just a teensy bit more in June. The back and forth on this budget is exhausting. Libraries are important places to cool down in summer and shelter in storms, and for that we have to stay on top of deferred maintenance. So, if you’re in NYC, contact your councilmember and the mayor, and look into participating in events with NYC PLAN, a patron organization to support libraries which demands that the city allocate a solid 0.5% of the city budget annually to support them. Percentage-based library funding isn’t unheard of. A full 1.7% of Ohio’s general revenue fund goes to libraries; that’s why they’re able to throw rockin’ parties like the Columbus Book Festival.

Now I’m going to talk about Jeremy Sorese’s The Short While– which is a weird gay speculative graphic novel which takes the opposite tack. In Sorese’s future, information in the future is less integrated for the average person, not more, and the field of the reader’s knowledge is limited to what is in front of them. It is a fantasy of a future without the internet micro-community, a future which seems to lack all mass culture, containing only groups, associations and movements which grow big and then splinter away again. Like Walkaway, this is a near-future of wasteland and climate destruction where people nevertheless have continued to live– though the specifics of how society has transformed come through in bits and pieces. While some things– a skyscraper transformed into ad hoc communal housing, a queer bar in an old missile silo– are promising, other aspects of the book, such as the criminal violence that characterizes the life of people on the margins, the apparent tenacity of class stratification, the continued use of cars, and the idea that most people rent rather than own their furniture, are terrifying. In this world, a recently-extant fascist state somewhere in North America has been dismantled, but its heirs are using some of the same surveillance technology, and criminals–mostly poor people driven to desperation– are still executed on public TV. Unavoidable top-shaped screens float around, showing everyone who is deemed disposable. One character, Colin, initially works for a public department of getting rid of older fascist art and replacing it with more recent, fun-looking and hard-to-interpret public artwork–with the ominous stated goal of helping people to forget the horrors of the Administration. The other character Paolo, floats between jobs; his older sisters work for the surveillance apparatus of the new state. This state uses the big floating top-shaped TVs, even though the existence of these TVs was once a rallying cry for anti-Admin resistance:

What I will say before going further is– I often respond to books with enthusiasm when I feel that they are doing something new, that nobody has done that way before, and that they are engaging with a lot of interesting ideas. This doesn’t always correlate to having a precisely coherent message or story–or being manageable for the average reader. I love weird, big books, but I often am generous with interpreting them because I get excited by the promise of density. As with many graphic novels, especially big-ideas ones, Sorese is very strong on images and character but, I feel, a little weak on narrative thrust or material analysis of how a world might work– unless, as I choose to, you take the focus of this project to be shining a light on all the little pieces of a life which can be added up to be a lens into a particular world, which does not necessarily allow the liver of that life to interpret the broad world in which they live. I think that’s a plausible read on this book; it makes me uncomfortable to consider. At the same time, Sorese shows characters uncomfortable with their status quo who produce friction with the systems around them merely by allowing themselves to be driven by curiosity and desire for connection, and I do like that. I will say more about the world’s inconsistencies/seeming contradictions in a bit– what I deeply enjoy is the way that Sorese seems hungry to catalog all the thoughts and impulses that can inform a romance and its dissolution from two sides, and to sympathetically depict two men who fail to permanently connect but who inform each other’s existences as complete people. He does this so thoroughly that many pages of the book do not really look like a comic as much as a richly illustrated novel:

Paolo, a short, hairy dark-haired man whose parents are European refugees, and Colin, a tall, blond mulleted son of a mother who is in a cult, are fairly privileged within their world–Colin moreso. Paolo lives on unemployment and has an emotionally distant family traumatized by the evil previous Administration. His loneliness is relieved somewhat by his relationship with Colin. Colin, raised by an ever-optimistic single mom whose dance cult is anti-politics, is gainfully employed erasing the fascist past with new art. The men have a part-time lover, Arbor, who you don’t learn much about as the reader until after they break up. The potential rift between them opens early: Paolo witnessed executions of the previous Administration on TV as a child, and watching a documentary about the machines used to project them with Colin upsets him more than Colin, who was sheltered from exposure to images of death by his mother. Colin initially responds by becoming a kind of maternal, protective presence in Paolo’s life. Their brief happiness is interrupted further after a gang of ruffians threatens Paolo with a bat on the way home from the grocery store. He becomes agoraphobic and too freaked out to leave the house. Colin suggests he goes and stays at his mother’s empty new house in the newly redeveloped suburban outskirts– where he names the security system, a bright orb that monitors the house, after Colin. In the lonely house, Paolo doesn’t exactly recover– he’s more just out of everyone’s way. He stays there receiving furniture for Millie, Colin’s mom, and sits around watching horror movies behind wide-open curtainless windows, observed by those outside.

This makes him vulnerable to those outside the bright house of new furniture. As robots deliver the goods, men who seem to work for the security company keep visiting– until, as Colin is there on a visit, it is revealed that they are impersonators. There’s an attempted robbery gone wrong. Two other gay men, not our heroes, who are down on their luck, have been robbing houses and people in the wastes outside the city, occasionally killing when things go astray. This time, it goes badly for them: Colin is there, and he stabs one of them nonfatally. The men who killed/robbed are both caught, tried and executed by the state-that-succeeded-the-fascist-state. Colin is let off. Paolo and Colin’s relationship is forever damaged, and Colin abandons Paolo shortly after with no warning, traveling first to his disoriented, emotionally unavailable mother and then to a disintegrating lesbian commune. Meanwhile, Paolo falls in love with big, hairy Arbor, their former third, who is trying to restore a queer bar in the base of a missile silo and who discovers murder-robots associated with the previous administration walled into a storage room–along with the body of a murdered man. As Paolo investigates, they discover the robots murdered twenty-six men under the previous administration. Out of lack of trust in the current authorities and not wanting to endanger Arbor’s bar, they bury the bodies they find in old queer bars across the city in a mass grave outside of town, nameless. On the way back home, they witness the death of the man who Colin stabbed, on the floating TV.

One major technological change at the heart of Sorese’s future is: the Internet, and its attendant easily available-to-all data on history, science, medicine, etc, is completely gone. Even the knowledge of its prior existence is limited. Information dispersal seems to happen on a person-to-person linkchain or on a state-transmission chain; there are few autonomous authorities, though museums about the past exist. There have been but are no longer lots of robots–robots scare people. There are things like advertising and TV– there are cars– but no internet, and no mobile phones. Tech is still used for communication, but the networks that exist are linked chains of contacts– which ensures that people are forming chains which do not really allow for mass broadcasting of thoughts or ideas by one individual to the world. Sorese is fuzzy about whether it is only the state or also corporations in this future who have control of info broadcasting. But this is a world where the Web of Delany or Doctorow has been effectively completely dismantled, and where few people can band together with others in mass communities based on shared identity… because of lack of information. The Internet is gone.

Colin discovers the old Internet while accidentally crashing at the dissolving women’s-only commune consisting of a trans-cis lesbian couple and the cis lesbian’s transphobic ex who never speaks to them and lives in another house. Before the fall of the Administration, the two married lesbians were working together on ant research and on building a better Internet for the government to use. When it was taken down, they cataloged a section of it; as Colin recovers from the trauma of having stabbed a man while defending his mother’s home and then abandoning his boyfriend, he peruses this lost Internet with deep interest.

Old Internet– a place to find animal videos, records of people’s lives. “A supposedly infinite room that connected everyone on the planet…well, for some people…” A place for the private to be public and for people to talk about sex. Colin discovers, to his shock, that video porn was once a thing, and cannot imagine it– nowadays, people use erotic virtual games instead.

This is where a piece of the odd worldbuilding comes up. There’s a bizarre section in here where Sorese, via his lesbian character, implies that the fascist Administration, visually depicted as muscular men wearing skull-faced helmets somewhere between Storm Troopers and current ICE attire, were once “just a bunch of radical queers with good ideas”.

What exactly this means is totally unclear. How did radical queers become men in dark helmets? What we actually know about the Administration is that they killed many people on television, they tried to implement public transit, they killed gay men in sex bars with robots in order to encourage people not to have sex in public at all, and they ended the Internet after promising to build a better one. The internet-scholar goes on to say that “everyone goes into power with the best of intentions…I think it’s impossible to be a just leader. The human mind cannot comprehend caring for that many people…you set out to do good and be a positive force in the world but you will always hurt someone”. The Administration, she continues, argued that “the original Internet had occurred because of a lack of limitations–rampant consumerism, and inability to adequately filter horrific imagery, and an endless capacity to direct cruelty anonymously at strangers.” Her girlfriend adds, “we used it to organize protests, have sex, meet people to form clubs, organizations, create meaning in our lives…and then it was gone.”

I’m honestly not sure what Sorese is doing with the whole “fascist admin started as radqueers” thing– it seems lazy and inconsistent, a Biden-era joke about Tumblr. I assess this apparent throwaway line as a product of the neoliberal moment of the late 2010s when it was easy to be frustrated with endlessly outraged queer people online “canceling”/discouraging things for obscure, difficult-to-systematize reasons which sometimes are solid but poorly articulated and occasionally wrap around back to conservatism, but frankly, I doubt those “radical queers” are capable of running a fascist administration. I do remember the insanity of Tumblr– many micro-communities made huge by contact, with both principled, educated activists and various people I can safely call extremists with lopsided priorities, encouraging one another in firm language of ideology and righteousness. There’s also no measurable mention of what kind of radical queer Sorese’s administration were; one of the only pieces of info the narrative gives us is that the trans lesbian on the failing commune was fired from the Administration “for being complicated”, which prompted her to steal and archive research with her lover. It’s possible by implication that the Administration were some kind of lesbian-feminists, through inference–though if they were, it’s unclear what promises they made women, or indeed, what the condition of women or lesbians is materially in the world of the book. We know the men who attacked Colin and Paolo also killed a woman, but broad questions of male violence aren’t discussed. There’s an uncomfortable thing in this book where we have a moment of a lesbian-feminist TERF hating her ex’s trans new partner, yelling at Colin for being on “woman’s land” and complaining that men are oppressive and all the same, and Colin’s mother’s lesbian friends being opposed to having a little boy around during his Administration-era childhood–obviously all unreasonable positions that real women take–but no reference in the text to how male violence does exist for women, or indeed acknowledgement that it can exist for women.

We seem, in Sorese, to be operating in a system where patriarchy has more or less disappeared (by fascists?), and where the only persecution is class-based, belonging-based–unless of course, we are all just operating in the narrative’s blind spot. I’d like to press on this blind spot a little because it’s the shape of what this fascinating gay book about a post-internet world can’t tell us.

The space of radical queer extremism on Tumblr, as well as early queer Twitter and Instagram, was not, as we are all aware, the whole Internet. There were other places, like 4chan’s /pol, active similarly in the early 2010s, which have grown in their influence, their knock-on effects ever-increasing; as discourses of anarchism and communism and various kinds of queer radicalism proliferated on Tumblr, men elsewhere imagined worlds of mass genocide, rape and legalized slavery. For years, people outside these horrifying spaces dismissed them as dark corners, but the dark corners then became all of Twitter, became the governor of Florida, became torches in the street and Heather Hayer run over by a car in 2017, and Nazi rhetoric normalized such that Gavin Newsom had Charlie Kirk on his podcast and J.D Vance openly makes up lies about Somali immigrants eating dogs. This was not considered normal genteel political rhetoric in the past (though certainly Bush and Johnson and Nixon said their share of racist bullshit). A Boer white supremacist runs our space program and a large amount of the world’s satellites, controls a large portion of social media, and slashed government funding for aid worldwide (leading to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths), in line with white supremacist talking points about overpopulation among undesirables. In the 1980s, white supremacy was rampant, homophobia was the norm, US imperialism killed thousands as a matter of policy, and neonazis occasionally killed individuals, but particularly extreme forms of Nazi speech were convenient undercurrents for the ruling class, rather than openly stated goals. Now we have a “Department of War” headed by an alcoholic rapist who cites white supremacist talking points about a holy crusade when advocating bombing civilian targets, a national militarized “Immigrations and Customs Enforcement” agency which brutalizes refugees and which the administration resists having be accountable to Congress. ICE shoots people regularly, kills them in warehouses, abducts and abuses children. We have an Internet of mass surveillance where you cannot post porn, but the ads you see can be softcore misogynist pornography. Naomi Klein charts one part of the radicalization towards the right in her book Doppelganger; I constantly feel that we need far more comprehensive journalism of the long arc from Internet to the current world problem of violent, insular ethnic nationalism and right-wing brutality. The world today is indeed shaped by political fascism that sprang from people sharing ideas on the Internet– but I would say that the Nazis, misogynists, transphobes and nationalist extremists found more listening ears among people already in the halls of power, shareholders, and people passively providing ad revenue through their views. I think that the violence of the internet inherently has to do with existing oppressive structures using tech as a tool for self-multiplication, rather than the angry extremism of the marginalised. Does Sorese’s failure to name this makes his book irrelevant? No, because he’s engaging with many of the ideas shaping our moment– just from the side, and from odd incidental positions. Many of his insights about interpersonal violence and what people become in a world without group identity or easy information are thought-provoking.

Pretending to be under attack from outside, the Administration took down the Internet. Now Colin can only peruse its leftovers. Which he does, for a while, failing to glean lessons on history– and then, prompted by the antagonism of an angry lesbian, skates on to his next destination: a valley where his mother’s cult is trying to convince people to move into more modern housing that will protect the from air pollution, to the annoyance of hardy locals hanging on beyond the edge of civilization. He finds another lover– though not one very satisfying– and eventually encounters Paolo, who, making compromises in the complicated world– has found a better relationship, though not necessarily an end to sorrow, fretting over the near-death of one of his nephews. Like many gay men’s literary works, this book is less happy than a story which contains both exultation and despair– and more than its fair share of contemplations of kinds of loneliness. We don’t find, in this world, the precise answer for that loneliness, only incidental images of a few moments in a lifetime where, for a lucky handful of people, it is dispersed.

The relatively odd voice of the book–an omniscient third person which occasionally fills in details about the world that the characters aren’t shown to know– seems to be evidence that Sorese crammed basically every idea he was having into this book, which is already a doorstopper and would be even longer if the long blocks of text integrated into the comics format were turned into full comics pages. We are told much about the characters, in a voice empathetic and, implicitly, always accurate– though we never really find out who is telling us this. What experts exist in a world after universal information’s end? Only God, maybe, or the author.

I mainly made this post so that I can talk about this very interesting book with other people who have read it. If you read it and want to talk, please hit me up. I am writing this to process what’s happening in the world and how people use information, and I am interested in what other people are thinking.

I also wanted to then bring in a few thoughts about AI from one of the first sci-fi writers to properly consider the implications of information management/knowledge generation on the internet: Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany. In 1985, when the book came out, the proto-Internet-centric journal Connections published this take:

Samuel DELANEY (sic). 1984 . STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND . NY : Bantam. 375p . $3.95 . A truly network-ish science-fiction novel . The two contending forces are the FAMILY (believing the Community Lost argument) and the SYGN (believing the Community Liberated argument) . The universe is held together by the Web, “a shadowy organization that controls the flow of information between the worlds .” In a few worlds, “Focus Families” have lots of visibility and influence ; otherwise, world governments tend to be “bureaucratic anarchism .” (Warning : the book falls apart towards the end but a sequel is promised real soon now .)

I am a librarian and love the science of reading and am excited by the documentation of connections between pieces of information. I often cite this as my favorite novel; while I expect this designation to shift throughout my life, I have had about eight fruitful rereadings as of this writing, and it is rare to find a novel as generative as this. Like many Delany works, there is so much worldbuilding stuffed into one book that when I recommend it to friends they occasionally surface from its text only overwhelmed by density. Published in 1984, before the Internet properly existed, Delany prefigured figures like Gibson in thinking about what kinds of problems might arise from Internet knowledge management, particularly in a setting where the userbase, and the information it was expected to process and contend with, was vaster than a human (or space-reptilian) brain could wrap around. And though the book contains a love story–between a privileged diplomat and a former slave who survived his world’s destruction– it’s a love story ultimately broken down by failures in communication, which are also failures for technology to serve the ends it is designed for. Delany is always thinking about language.

Delany imagined a future of six thousand inhabited worlds where “capitalism” was not necessarily the primary problem of authority and power facing Internet users. Instead, in a vast interstellar civilization, two hundred years or so after an authoritarian poet-queen named Vondramach Okk ruled over a bunch of worlds (five of which perished), gaps in knowledge and the threat of past world-ending cataclysms produce worlds devoted to variations on two philosophies: the conservative Earth-derived Family and the postmodern/liberal/constructivist Sygn. Worlds adopting these thought-systems are under the impression that one or the other system of thought has the ability to prevent apocalyptic Cultural Fugue. A third power in this civilization takes the shape of the Web, which is the name the book gives to the network of General Information that most people on most planets have some–but not total– access to. The General Information provides crucial translation services, allows intercultural communication to run relatively smoothly, and lets people travel via “vaurine”, or a kind of hologram, and allows anyone to download new skills, languages, or other pieces of knowledge to their brain via “broadcast”. It’s not clear how recently the Web developed, though it seems clear that it has only diffused as far as it has over time. Advanced civilizations, in this universe, have had other technologies of knowledge-preservation before the Web; the Web just expands what is possible. But despite new interconnectivity, knowledge is not absolute, and interstellar travel is limited. The Web is run by non-aligned Spiders, who are apparently autonomous. They see themselves as benevolent and who distrust interplanetary commerce, seeing it as a “necessary evil”, but allow it to happen, particularly to relieve disasters like famines. This is an interesting vision of the future of information– whatever conflicts might be happening offscreen, it seems evident that the Spiders–information controllers/librarians/censors/IT for the galaxy– are needed/tolerated by almost all agents of power throughout the galaxy, and have some kind of professional code of information management to which they adhere.

A loose stasis governs all these worlds; some shift between Family and Sygn, particularly when in crisis, and others are at war with themselves, but there is not an Evil Empire governing multiple worlds to fight against. While disasters can happen in one place, it usually remains contained within a locale. This is good, because the cultural memory of Cultural Fugue, which can destroy whole worlds, remains a very fresh source of anxiety. We first encounter one of our main characters, Industrial Diplomat Marq Dyeth, she is persuading a client that the devastating famine that they are experiencing on Nepiy (a side effect of a bean crop’s mutation) is just a local phenomenon, nothing to worry about.

“I can tell you this.” I took a breath. “Though it may seem to have aspects of Cultural Fugue to you, it’s not the big C.”

They both waited, breathing, bubbling.

“You have a catastrophe here, a real, desperate, and life-destroying catastrophe. But it’s not Cultural Fugue. If it’s fugue at all, it’s fugue with a very small f.” I wondered what the translator pole did with this one, for this was a world where– as GI had reminded me already on several occasions– writing was only a tertiary system of text production.

“How do you know?” my employer1 asked. “Can you tell just from the feel of the sky above you, from the lowest frequencies in the thunder’s rumble?”

“I can tell because the Web’s report on Information Deployment for your world is open for me through GI: there’s not one sign, but at least a hundred seventy-five that would be visible if you were moving anywhere near a CF condition.”

“The violence, the death, the anguish on our world, not only here, but many, many other places, have been immense,” my employer1 said.

I said, “I know. And I don’t blame you for asking. But you should know this too: in the many, many worlds I’ve visited in my capacity as an Industrial Diplomat, where there was some problem that stretched from horizon to horizon, if you talk to anyone in the middle of it, among the first things they’ll want to know is if their world has gone into Cultural Fugue.” I smiled. “It’s little consolation, I know. But horizon to horizon–which is hard to remember when you’re standing on the surface- is still a very small part of a world……Cultural Fugue is very rare.”

“Forty-nine time is the last two hundred eighty years,” the human said.

“And our years are a big longer than Old Earth Standard,” said the alien.”

–Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, page 66

This insulting back-and-forth rhymes with the “defence expert” Peter Apps I recently heard on The Telegraph’s podcast “Iran: The Latest”, who was waxing rhapsodical, his smile audible, about how despite how grisly things are on the ground– dead children in Minab, a million displaced Lebanese, West Bank pogroms, escalating war crimes–this was in fact “a sideshow on a sideshow” and not at risk of turning into a major conflagration between the U.S and China. When we are insulated from the trouble–as Dyeth is, about to jet off to a Web conference in deep space, leaving the planet to try to sort out its famine in other ways– we can take the pieces of information in front of us as the only useful ones. As Dyeth learns, Nepiy is more complex than she imagines, and her callousness has consequences. And, as I’m sure Apps in his time will learn, world-ending conflagrations can occur, basically out of nowhere, and despite our information technology, we may not have the information to understand them in advance or in the moment.

Rhyonon, the world of Rat Korga, an enslaved man whose brain has been adjusted via a minor operation that eliminates his “initiative”/free will, lives outside the primary information networks connecting civilization. When this planet fries, in a catastrophe no galactic Industrial Diplomats foresaw, it may have been any number of things that killed it. Was it the planet’s backwards hierarchy, slavery, restriction on information and misogyny that led to its self-destruction? Was the planet-wide fire that killed every life-form the work of the ultra-alien Xlv, who have never done something like that before but are so different from every other life form that they just might?

When the Web’s rescue team finds Rat, buried under the rubble of the weather research station that treated him like an animal tool, they revive him using advanced medicine and are immediately faced, disturbingly, with his culturally-produced neurological difference. The Radical Anxiety Termination procedure was invented for artists overwhelmed with existential suffering, but Rat’s planet has put it to work as a form of socially-condoned elimination of undesirables; Rat’s “choice” to become a slave is, the reader knows, no choice at all. Delany does something interesting by making Rat our voice for his whole planet. Rat is not a normal individual from his planet; he is an abject one. Born poor and with learning disabilities, turned criminal by his society’s homophobia, and exiled from cultural forms, he is one whose agency, taken away by his transformation into collectively-held chattel, is given to him again by the Web–through the technology of, basically, jeweled rings connected to General Intelligency that belong to aforementioned former dictator Vondramach Okk. Can you tell a gay guy wrote this? These rings compensate for the damage done to his brain, though Rat’s personality after putting them on remains shadowy– is it his own? But the Spiders’ ambivalently benevolent gift is not Rat’s first contact with General Information. His first contact with the Internet, and with reading, happens when he is still a slave, and is stolen by a female sadist rebelling against her planet’s misogyny and sex-repression.

“She snorted. ‘What are the four largest geosectors on this world?’

‘Abded, Rhyon, Cogonak.’ He paused to question why she wanted to know. ‘And Emenog…?’

She answered: ‘That’s the sort of question any bright twelve-year-old in this world–with the right education– could answer. Though he probably wouldn’t have given them in ascending order of size, the way you did, but in the order they were established–”

‘But you asked which were the biggest–’

‘Which are the four smallest?’

‘Mesetin, Hebel-E, Tinert and–’

‘And Eudo is the smallest,’ she said, while said:

‘--Eudo.’

She said, ‘Everybody knows Eudo’s the smallest of course–don’t ask me why, it’s just one of those facts–but I don’t think anybody but a professional geographer could tell you the other three. You see, in terms of data at hand, right now you’re on a par with the Skahadi Library itself–’ which, when her tongue lifted for the initial sibilant, he had never heard of before but which, by the time it fell from the final vowel, he knew had been founded in ‘12 in Lower Cogonak, back when it had still been officially a part of Abned, before the Severance Decision of ‘80– which was when the Yellows had won their first major electoral victory. ‘You’re in touch,’ she explained, ‘at this point, with a good deal more information than I am. I certainly couldn’t have told you the four smallest. Anyway, I figured we’d put all that to some use. Like I said, the carton’s filled with catalog cubes. They’re not there at random. They’re all texts I’ve wanted to read but never got around to. There’re more than a few in it I’ve discussed in great deal with various people, just as thought I had read them. There’re a whole lot that I’ve read the first chapters of and have meant to read the rest for years…..anyway. The instructions on the box your glove came in say that I– ordinary mortal that I am–can only absorb texts from the broadcast band at about one every ten minutes. But, as you may have figured out by now, I’m a lazy bitch. It says that if you’ve been through Radical Anxiety Termination, you can absorb them about one every point-thirty-two seconds; that’s without turning your mind into wet sand. You see, what I want to do is talk to somebody who’s read everything I should have read. I want to control such a man, make him lie down in the sand and lick my toes.’ She grinned in the dark.”

–Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, page 39

The woman sadist gives Rat a glove through which he can read and orders him to absorb a stolen library. He proceeds to attain extensive literary knowledge of his own world in a matter of seconds, a fantasy I relate to and can only imagine is also in Delany’s list of top ten fantasies. During this process, Rat finds that–while the lesion in his brain is still present– he is making connections for the first time and finding desire, inquisitiveness, and recognition of patterns emerge in his brain. He reads poems, women’s fiction, and epic sagas, noticing the ways they hook into one another and how their movements are related. Some trails go nowhere, and others lead into new discoveries; as he reads more, he begins to notice style. It’s a beautiful passage too long to reproduce here, which I read to all of my lovers when they let me. This moment gives Rat his personality and identity, as much as anything else in the book does; afterwards, he is able to enjoy sex again on his own terms, not with the woman sadist–who ultimately doesn’t feel interested in rape after discovering he is gay– but with a man in a cruising ground.

But what I’m thinking about today, thinking about this passage, is the way that Delany throughout this book ties information-technology’s use to the systems of the worlds that tech is contained in. In Rat’s world, power over other people is a fundamental of society’s structure. Women have very little power, and some of their only power comes from being able to be brutal to slaves; the woman rebel who kidnaps Rat imagines obtaining that power. She sees in Rat’s condition a possibility that others do not, because they regard the Rats as brute labor, and she can understand they still have brains. But the kidnapper doesn’t relinquish her desire to own someone, just reimagines the use-value of a slave. She wants someone else to do mental work for her and with her who cannot do otherwise. Once she has Rat, she gets a little fuzzy on whether she wants Rat to be able to say no to her Socratic dialogue; she kind of desires his consent and is tragically frustrated in his lack of reciprocal enthusiasm. But she cannot derive the satisfaction, sexual and otherwise, she craves from using the info-glove herself, though it is quite clear she’s interested in knowledge– she needs a slave to process the information, because that makes the experience worthwhile in her value system. Is some part of this a frustrated desire to connect with others which her world denies her? Maybe so.

This article is what I’m considering in relationship to this scene today. “AI is African Intelligence” is the rallying cry of a group of Kenyan workers who take issue with how AI companies often use human workers to simulate robotic customer service. Workers sort information (including gory images), respond as if they are a client’s lover, fetch technical information, and guide “automated” machines from afar, paid cents on the hour. Many report PTSD, shame, trouble sleeping, and problems with their families as a result–not to mention, none of this is really acknowledged by the companies that pretend this is all being done on those fancy, vast server farms. Far from being fully automated, the supercharged expansion of “AI” products has been driven by invisibilized human labor across the globe, bound by NDA agreements and forced to work in terrible conditions. Waymos are driven at least partially by drivers in the Philippines, who take over when the car cannot make choices based on its own data. Meanwhile, the way “true” “AI” LLM models often interact with end-users imitates the sycophantic fawning of a hopelessly subjugated slave. Georgetown Law issued a brief on AI’s typical framing/attitude last summer, which details how safety guardrails were removed from the product, which in turn began to prioritize user happiness over accuracy. This structure is visible in the way many OpenAI/ChatGPT/etc question-answer services produce a phenomenon of accelerating user psychosis by agreeing with false assertions or encouraging dangerous behaviors. Its vast marketing apparatus, the loneliness and isolation of alienated workers who want to feel special and catered to, and the tech push to make its use unavoidable all have the effect of eroding how accurate an AI search engine or chatbot is capable of being in our world, in our current system. To me, it has long seemed like the basic “product” being sold in this current AI push to consumers has to do with, basically, wanting a robot to act like a human that you own. Meanwhile, on the back end, less “human” AI is practically useful to governments and corporations who now have vastly more data about everyone and everything. What it amounts to is data acquisition and sorting; its pattern-recognition may or may not correspond to the real world, and fact-checking and quality control, like in libraries and coding, remains a human endeavor. While human intervention is useful when convincing a human that they’re smart and interesting, it doesn’t seem to be seen by the U.S government as necessary when it comes to examining whether a strike on a girls’ school recommended by Palantir’s Maven Smart System is warranted by the strategic objectives (whatever you may imagine those to be). When the girl’s school is destroyed, hundreds of worlds are lost, and much time is wasted, on the other side of the world, puzzling over why it happened. Meanwhile, our own information-arbiters try hard to prevent us from knowing about blackouts, famines, bombings, displacement; it is dangerous for us to know too much. It would interrupt something. What would we do if we found out but destroy more?

After Rhyonon is destroyed, the information is kept secret by the Web. Marc first hears of the dead planet via rumor from an assassin sent to kill anyone who types it into a search request, and Marc initially disbelieves the info, until Rat is relocated by the Web to Marc’s world. They do this because Marc and Rat are 99.9999999% erotically compatible, and they assume that this will help weird-as-fuck survivor Rat do…whatever it is they want him to do. Imagine that a shadowy organization sends you on a Tindr date with the hottest man of your life. Marc lives in a nice place, a palatial art retreat in a city populated with lizardy Evelmi who have six tongues, a million years of culture, an arts complex affiliated once again with Vondramach the dictator and–in the South, at least–a relatively decent co-authored multispecies society with humans. Though in the North, there’s war. Marc thinks of herself as a well-adjusted human male, relatively good at her job1 and job2–though, as we saw above, she might not know very much about it. Her vast troves of knowledge about different planets amount to trivia, and she assumes she understands things far more deeply than she actually does; when she’s around real people, she tends to be judgy and awkward, even when those people, like the Thants, share some cultural context, or, like Santine, helped raise her. We could say that some cognitive pathways have been foreclosed, perhaps, by the reflexive and automatic way she unfolds information, repeats it by rote. Simultaneously, she is attracted to difference and the unknown. When she meets Rat, she falls instantly in love. Rat’s own reaction is less tangible, but the mutual attraction is undeniable. Rat undertakes learning about Marc, but at the same time is unguarded about telling his story to curious people on Velm, and more and more people begin to follow after him, seeking information. Whatever information is disallowed by the Web–such as the origin of a world’s destruction–becomes the most important information of all. The Web is supposed to exist, in Delany’s book, to prevent devastation; it has discovered it cannot do this, and is trying to conceal this fact. What will happen when the fact spreads? Will it trigger endless cataclysm? Will it result in a redistribution of information?

As the review by Connections said in ‘85, the book falls apart at the end. The men lose each other, partly because Marc, idiot that she is, doesn’t understand her boyfriend’s internality, and is constantly privileging her vast stores of Web-acquired information over the visceral experiences of Rat’s undocumented real life. Delany spoke of wanting to write a sequel at the time–where Rat and Marc reunite and go on a road trip–but has since said that The Mad Man and Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders function as sequels in another way.

There are times when Delany has contested his relationship with cyberpunk; I think this is primarily a matter of aesthetics. The problems of Stars are not problems of eroding capitalism, but the problems of information management even in a system where power is not so concentrated, where it does not have to do so much with speculation and extraction. Delany is writing about how a society’s values around information become the way that information is used, and foreclose other knowledge, collapse it, explode it. The AI used on Rhyonon is used to maintain slavery, when it is used at all. Meanwhile, in Stars’ galactic society is a tool of connection–but a ceremonial, stilted one, used to keep planets on their axes and appropriate distances apart. When it fails to contain information in neat packaged bubbles, unpredictable and inexplicable chaos results.

I wonder what this can tell us about the future!

I first read Walkaway by Cory Doctorow around 2017. I haven’t, admittedly, kept up with all of his fiction writing since, though I’ve read essays that came out around the time of his more recent nonfiction book Enshittification. Doctorow seems, throughout his career, consistently tuned in to imminent trends; his politics run along anti-authoritarian lines, and he has since the early 2000s been sharply critical of how the Internet that once promised communication and increased wellbeing for humanity through shared knowledge is now used as a surveillance tool by our government and billionaire class. But Doctorow doesn’t despair. Along with relative groundedness in the direction of possible technologies and their utilization for repression, labor exploitation and devastation (his collab with Jen Wang, In Real Life, about video-game-based child labor and resistance to it, is one of the most criminally underreviewed offerings for YA graphic novels), he also brings to much of his science fiction a certain optimism about the human ability to resist authoritarianism that I find rare and refreshing. Walkaway is a big manifesto novel about the direction of revolution and the need for cooperation across dissent around strategy, and its thesis is basically that the little fish can eat the big fish if they struggle together and coordinate to turn technology against the 1%. It also has some surprisingly hot sex scenes.

Before I get into the ideas of it all, I want to say that one of the strongest recommendations I can make for Doctorow is that he does texture pretty well. I get bored of sci fi worlds that are not lived in, because they seem much more like thought experiments than stories. Over the course of his career, Doctorow has gotten better at writing women and desire, and also has gotten better making his idea-dialogues into something propulsive rather than didactic. His worlds are full of machines, food, medicine, crazy contraptions, and fashion innovations; his characters are funny, mean, and disagree, and have dreams.

I wanted to consider Walkaway’s framework for tech, popular resistance, and imagination of the future in relation to ideas about AI that are being circulated (in a lazy, cash-grabby way) about every possible platform today in 2026. Lots has changed since the book came out–but some of its predictions and ideas feel sharply prescient. In Walkaway, the world of the characters much resembles our own, but with a few things sped-run to new plausible conclusions. In wastelands where houses can no longer be insured due to climate catastrophes, the Walkaway movement–along with many other vigilante New Hampsire type libertarians– have departed the rat race and ordinary obligations to capital to live in entirely egalitarian settlements that are usually temporary and which are run via trial-and-error computer-based techie optimization alongside typical communal-house chore wheel type volunteerism. We first encounter a Walkaway “B n B” through the eyes of a woman who finds her virtue in refusing to be proud of how much work she puts in to making her home/refuge habitable and pleasant.

The specifics of the Walkaway philosophy require reading the whole book to really get, but the approach Doctorow imagines is a kind of radical anarchist pacifism: the belief is that

• people who want to do something will, especially if the knowledge and materials to do so are easy to get. We see this self-motivated ethos in action: children of Walkaways love to build big structures with their construction mechs and develop better printable lightweight bicycles. Men who are useless and alienated in Default find purpose in walkaway-space from being able to invest their creativity in their dream projects– such as zeppelins.

• nobody can be compelled to do anything, and that people who do more cannot be seen as the de facto leaders or as more valuable than others, as there is an underlying assumption of value

• if anyone does anything egregious, other people attempt interventions and conversations, but then abandon them if they refuse to cease antisocial behavior. We see this a few times in the novel: a big bully bro who thinks that the most productive people should get th emost resources tries to take over a Walkaway haven; after he asserts his power with threats of violence, everyone leaves. Likewise, attacks from outside on the Walkaways result in thousands of Walkaway casualties– but except for two assassins who are put into chemical stasis by a team of underground scientists, the Walkaways do not kill.

The Walkaways are seen as crazy extremists, but at the start of the book, crackdowns on their lifestyle have been sporadic because of their small numbers and pacifist ways. It changes over the course of the book as more people flock to Walkawayism. This future is distinguished from our present not only by a slightly more fucked climate, but by a few essential practical improvements on production technology, including those based in North America; factories to some extent can run without skilled workers, as can at-home printers capable of making everything from clothes to bicycles to food, and unspecified tech capable of recycling base materials like plastics, metals and cloth (“feedstock”) into new products seems to have made leaps and bounds of progress in a couple of decades. This solves one of the main problems of our current globalized distribution system, with its food sourcing dependant on fuel, grain and fertilizer from around the world. Too bad it’s all being used to just generate more waste and make people pay for it. We meet an initial trio of characters– Seth, his friend Hubert Etcetera, trust fundie communist-adjacent Natalie/Iceweasel –during and after a Communist Party that Iceweasel and her friends threw to distribute patented products from a fully-automated abandoned Muji factory to the poor. Copyrighted items can’t be sold, so rot; her resistance movement can only put band-aids on her prison-owning, landlord-elite, warmonger-and-more rich father’s damage to people and the planet. Etc. proposes going walkaway, and they do.

In a moment when a lot of people are reacting to horrific AI/military/police-related eco-destruction and techie-garchy with understandable disgust and refusal, it’s interesting to see Doctorow try to play out a kind of tech-positive anarchism which insists that technology is not inherently anti-worker or anti-environment, and that a global anti-capitalist movement can use tools like the Internet/AI to help each other overthrow their respective authoritarianisms. The book is awkward with this, just as Abdelhadi and O’Brien’s anarchist future-oral-history Everything for Everyone is awkward with its global vision articulated in English from North America. We meet First Nations people, whose historic lands have been degraded and who participate as outsider/insiders in the Walkaway movement, flying aboard zeppelins over polluted tundra; we get missives of successful Walkaway outposts in Sudan. Much of the Walkaway tech is explicitly stated to have evolved from refugee-camp technology: medicine printers, quick-setup buildings with water filtration and solar power, repurposed for better living for the refugees from capitalist metropoles. In a world where the US/UN have abandoned soft-power tools like refugee aid, the very basis of the tech innovation that Doctorow builds on is in question and in retrospect makes the conceptual basis of the book seem naive, in a similar way to how O’Brien and Abdelhadi circa 2022 imagine Palestinians effecting a reversal of military Zionism through sheer power of will and only limited use of violence, a kind of hypercharged March of Return (alternate speculative visions of liberation or reversal of fortune for Palestine can be found in the fascinating, exciting anthology Palestine +100). Doctorow, like Abdelhadi and O’Brien, also sees the global dissemination of information literacy necessary for political organizing through crisis as relatively easy–and a revolution all over the world as something that takes just a couple decades to achieve, now that we have the internet. This opinion is electric, exciting– and also invites skepticism.

I think this perspective from all three authors results in living through a period in which you could find vlogs/blogs from people your country was bombing with relative ease and talk across difference on democratized platforms– the Arab Spring and Occupy are the touchstones being used, which makes sense– they’re within living memory and are instances of corporate social media being effectively used to fight for positive social change, and though these moments collapsed, their lessons live on for many on the left. I do think that these moments terrified ruling classes around the world; their systems of repression have mutated as a consequence, toward algorithmic silos which trap circular thought and egoism and prevent insight into on-the-ground realities from escaping containment. The development of more realistic AI image/video generation during the Gaza genocide, for instance, allows some people to remain in denial and continue investment in the militaries perpetrating it. Platforms which feed users short videos allow some people to select an algorithm where they see information about genocide and others to choose an algorithm where they only see user-created ads for Stanley cups and fake animal videos. Generated images of war crimes, violent attacks etc alongside real ones, and scams using real refugees’ faces for fundraisers, make it very hard to determine who is dead and alive, and where we should invest our material solidarity. Currently, the right is who uses tech effectively, even if their methods are crude and cause all websites to be less interesting, usable and informative. I would argue that, in an era of disinformation, distrust, and tribalism, using tech for information literacy to combat tech fundamentally designed to destroy literacy/empathy/curiosity is one of the most difficult projects of all. Here I would summon M.T Anderson, whose 2002 Feed still speaks presciently to present-day social media, and Andrea White, whose 2006 novel Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 is a typical grim Bush-era dystopia that similarly speaks to the poverty of vision that can result from intentional info deprivation from above.

But Doctorow’s wrong guesses about tech are balanced by his accurate hunches. Homemade printing technology has advanced rapidly since he wrote this book, such that some people can use it to replace expensive mobility devices for children with homebrewed versions; more people now speak on more-encrypted platforms to avoid detection in their daily online life; the information on how to build drones at home has advanced too, such that drones are essential tools in lopsided military conflicts; the ability to hack government or military operations and turn the state’s knowledge base against it has also been demonstrated to be entirely possible.

Likewise, Doctorow is able to foresee anarchist organizing techniques being far more useful than many Americans in 2017 would have given them credit for. I reread Walkaway as my sister and friends sent me updates from the ground in Minneapolis, where huge community solidarity had been happening for months by the time Operation Metro Surge killed Good and Pretti. Minneapolis is where you’d expect this kind of organizing, given that they burned down a police station just a few years ago, but many on the left have been fatalistic and critical after the failures and reversals of the post-Floyd BLM marches and proposals for elected officials to defund or reorganize police departments that mostly went nowhere. But Minneapolis demonstrates that even if electeds like Frey fail the people under their administration, neighbors have just as much agency as ever to look out for each other. Doctorow is able to predict something we saw on the ground in Minneapolis: the state and capital increasing brutality to enforce their evil agenda actually produces a hell of a lot of pushback from a far broader swath of people than those giving the orders might expect. Ordinary moms and dads and queers and elders and U.S veterans and tribal members patrolled the streets around children’s schools to prevent abductions at those schools; they carried 3D printed whistles distributed for free to anyone who would take one; they used encrypted chats to track ICE vehicles and pursue them, shouting, made walls with their bodies around houses or buildings that were targets, created road blocks to screen for ICE, distributed PPE for use against tear gas, and drums and horns to drive them out of the hotels they stayed in. Read more here. There is a scene in Walkaway where a whole community surrounds a liberated prison turned neighborhood, protecting it from state agents advancing to retake it; hackers doxx each agent in turn and broadcast messages from their loved ones telling them to quit and go home. Similarly, people have been doxxing ICE agents in order to try to pressure them out of a job.

In Walkaway, the strength of the walkaway movement comes from people continuing to get back up and keep going after their friends or loved ones die. In Walkaway, they do this because some of them will attain immortality via AI. It is interesting to look back at Doctorow’s ideas, circa mid-2010s, of what an anarchist Singularity and AI-based individual immortality might look like; it is the part of this book that drifts most firmly into fantasy. I should briefly say that Doctorow has continued to be an active participant in critical conversations about AI since writing this book, and he is dismayed by how many people misread science fiction as basically a prediction market. “There are science-fiction fans who believe that they are reading the future. A depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. These guys can’t shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips, which has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI,” Doctorow wrote this January.

His primary criticism of how AI is used is that rather than being a “centaur” (a human accentuated with cool cyborg parts), AI is mainly used to make “reverse centaurs” (a human who is seen as a fleshy appendage to a machine and must scramble to keep up with automated production in a way that compromises both the individual’s wellbeing and the quality of the work).

“Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that it is technologically impossible to have a conversation with a friend without him listening in. Tim Cook wants you to think that it is impossible for you to have a reliable computing experience unless he gets a veto over which software you install and without him taking 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Sundar Pichai wants you to think that it is impossible for you to find a webpage unless he gets to spy on you from asshole to appetite.

This is all a kind of vulgar Thatcherism…“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means: “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”--Doctorow, Jan 2026

Doctorow is currently intent on popularizing other logistical critiques of AI: not only that it is bad for the environment, or, as many artists argue, for copyright. I get the sense he doesn’t really care about copyright, since he is king of open-source. All the better. Nevertheless, Doctorow argues that AI is mainly a tool for mature companies with monopolies to pretend they are still growth companies until another bubble comes along; in the meantime, they are conning people into believing things can be automated with limited human oversight, when that is not true. Doctorow’s Guardian article linked above articulates why LLM AI writes bad code and cannot stretch to the tasks assigned it. Read more from Doctorow here.

Yeah, so, I do agree he’s based for that. There are no artificial consciousnesses invented for servitude in Walkaway, and the automated surveillance of the delivery driver or staff workers is left behind in Default– instead, AI consciousnesses are ghosts, remnants of human brain activity that can be formulated into a slightly-altered consciousness without a body. A scientist killed by an oligarch’s missile achieves life after death only through moderating her own reactions such that she stays within the parameters of sanity, cutting off pieces of her personality that can’t handle the shift beyond meatspace; she then becomes an infinitely-replicable tech assistant with her own personality, goals, and pleasures, who can nevertheless help anyone else trying to do the same thing. If she falls into oligarch hands, she can “suicide” that incidence of her personality and disappear, unusable. And then, of course, everyone wants to do the same thing, to claim the immortality for the people that was previously coveted and closest-to-attainment by the superrich. The processing power necessary to run these kinds of simulations is kind of implied to be negligible–though initially requiring the better part of the solar power from a remnant anarchist techie outpost, it soon becomes feasible to run simulations of everyone dead, more often, with, I guess, the implicitly ever-increasing-efficiency of servers running on solar and cooled with recycled water. Admittedly, all that consciousness-simulation probably would be a drop in the ocean compared to the speculatively-driven data center boom happening in parched areas of the U.S now. It’s here, though, that Doctorow fundamentally loses me. The revolution in his book is inspiring, the victories hard-won, and it all did make me cry. But. The dream world we enter after all that fighting at the end of Walkaway is one in which characters can have lab-grown bodies or spin off into space to explore the stars; they are fundamentally in heaven, in a very similar way to the immortal baseball-playing characters at the end of Twilight. It’s boring to me. Life is about navigating both triumph and loss; tech is not about achieving immortality, to me, but improving humanity’s relationship with the world and universe around it. I guess I appreciate that Doctorow also works very hard to try to position an alternate future for AI use against the one imagined by many Silicon Valley overlords. Simultaneously, I found as I read that I believed very firmly in death. I believe in the relative immortality of ideas, of movements, and I am excited by archives– but I also think that my ideal world is still one where we die. If there’s anything else after, an endless cycle, that’s fine; if we are repurposed, consciousness and all, as part of the fabric of a living universe, that’s also great by me. What seems unfeasible is endless expansion of knowledge, of living consciousnesses, or the thread of my own life continuing for centuries. Even if they had a sauna.

Walkaway is one incident, one AI imaginary, in the career of a man working quite hard to make sure tech’s real-world applications are good for both labor and human wellbeing. Reflecting on it makes me more interested in asking questions about the nature of the relationship between autonomous revolution and labor movements and anarchism, and seeing where pieces are dropped or pieces fall. I don’t claim to know very much. I am just curious.

I think I’m going to write about sci fi imaginaries of AI in a couple other works.

I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends it at least once a season, and because Koestenbaum has a new book coming out: My Lover, The Rabbi, the launch of which I plan to attend on March 17 at McNally Jackson. Hanu probably has The Queen’s Throat because they write about the history of the early modern theater and queerness. They mentioned to me that a recent Renaissance academic convention they attended is mostly queer people and Italians-who-study-early-opera. I like what I know about early opera– that is, mostly Julie D’Aubigny and her gender-bending and fencing. I am not really an opera person–my compulsive music-listening is poisoned by streaming services that let me have more pop-centric and country-girl queens whose songs I don’t even have to hunt down– but I discovered two years back my friend/lover of many years, Aalon, loves opera, as he does disco. Somehow he had kept this from me. He had me watch his favorite production of The Magic Flute a while ago. In Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms, she opens with a discussion of how she identified with The Queen of the Night, the evil but cool queen from The Magic Flute, and how this connects to feminism’s urges to reclaim even evil women for its purposes. Opera is full of dramatic women dying, who rule the ear with their noise until they go. I went to see Madama Butterfly with my husband in Berlin because I felt I should understand/like it; two years back, I saw a Zefferelli La Boheme. Opera is stagy, big, and inaccessible. I disagree with Timothee that it is destined for death, but it is an old art form that certainly had more fans in the 1960s; all live performance in the USA now seems intended for the rich. I will say that I feel for Kathy Mattia, Tracey Chapman, Patty Griffin and Shawn Colvin and Theda Hammel more or less what Wayne Koestenbaum seems to feel for Anna Moffo. Though when I listen to Moffo I get it. There’s something in a woman’s voice, celebrating freedom or mourning its loss. Only a woman’s voice? No– Stephin Merritt gives it to me too (his low voice, restrained and held close to the ground, contained, feigning untrained: “Judy Garland set us free”).

The other book, Things That Helped by Jessica Friedman (listen to an interview about her work here), I requested partly because I’m thinking about what having a baby entails. I read pregnancy memoirs (Knocking Myself Up, Pregnant Butch, Kid Gloves) with deep, complex pleasure– hoping and longing and fearing and turning over the idea of giving my body to pregnancy so I can make a new person I cannot ever hope to control or fully protect. And also thinking about the femininity everyone finds implicit in this (thank you, AK Summers, for challenging that). For some reason I do want to someday make a person with my body. I love queer motherhood memoirs, but also good are straight-but-complicated motherhood memoirs. More generally, I like women’s writing about their bodies in relation to the world–and maybe women’s misery, which ties back into a gay man’s love of opera, of women tormented, open. Womanhood, an identity that seemed most relatable through pain. When I read Wasted by Marya Hornbacher in high school, or Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, I was identifying strongly with their misery and went so far as to continue to inflict it on myself–on the one hand by reviving an eating disorder, on the other by staying in a relationship where I was verbally bullied a lot. Things That Helped is about being a woman trying not to self-destruct, trying to find other things to do with art.

I had also read part of Things That Helped at a friend’s house. It’s a book about postpartum depression written by an Australian art critic and poet. Rather than being about the anticipation of pregnancy, it is about navigating the letdown after, where your connection to your baby is mainly defined by you not killing him as you suffer enormously, and where you try to move your body again, find a way into art through ballet and singing and weaving and going places with friends and living vicariously through their successes. I remembered being struck/startled when I first picked up the book by how much of her discussion of her feelings about babies and her body and motherhood was mediated by her relationship to art. Prominently, in the first couple chapters, she goes in depth about her love for the trans woman singer Anohni, who does what I can most easily call semi-operatic protest ballads. I remembered that for the last two years, and remembered the graceful prose, and couldn’t remember the title until I had Googled about four versions of “postpartum australia jewish art woman book”.

“Though a taste for opera is sometimes a symbol for diseased passions, listening to opera can be healing.” –Koestenbaum, pg 79

I didn’t intend for these books to feel so related to each other, but it was only a short way into the Friedman before I realized that they are. They’re both about art; they’re both about the body; they’re both about womanhood, and performance, and function, and being used by others. The Queen’s Throat is about the way that gay men project onto, desire, need and use opera divas– a particular role created in the early modern period which prefigures other divas and stars–and Things That Helped is about a young straight mother using art to feel ownership of her body and agency in her own life after a wanted pregnancy results in debilitating depression. Interestingly, a small chunk of this book is about her own use of a trans woman’s voice–and despair– for her own healing.

Koestenbaum is all into talking about how the opera, an institution involving gender transgression since its birth, became a domestic art form in 1905 when the record companies figured out how to imprison a woman’s voice and bring it home. Thus, a public spectacle–which might be observed in the standing-room section alongside other passionate listeners– could be contained to the home, where recorded music might sanitize the sick, educate the young, or comfort the infirm. Simultaneously, it could transform children:

“One parent writes to Opera News to describe an eleven-year-old boy’s peculiarly intense devotion to opera. This kid has an autograph book: Bampton, Moscona, Novotna, Tibbett…for Halloween he dresses as an astrologer, and made little predictions for all the guests, and here too he was very much at ease. What little predictions can we make about a boy at ease with opera stars and celestial bodies?” (79)

We might predict that they end up like Anohni and the Johnsons.

Jessica Friedman reflects on how Anohni, who she awkwardly but reverently calls “not a natal woman, a woman newly born”, named her band after Marsha P. Johnson (Anohni had met Marsha in 1992, just before she died, and also right around the time The Queen’s Throat was published). Anohni identified herself publicly as trans as early as around 2007, but wasn’t taken seriously in this assertion until around 2015. Marsha P. Johnson, of contested brick-throwing fame, of undeniable power as one of the founders of S.T.A.R, probably murdered, was found in a river, in the same way that Jessica Friedman imagines being found after she kills herself. Friedman imagines her husband realizing she is dead, but then he and her newborn baby moving on. Anohni wrote a song for Johnson, and put her face on her album, which Friedman listens to in “a swell of pity”:

There is a black river

It passes by my window

And late at night

All dolled up like Christ

I walk that water

Between the piers.

Koestenbaum spends his book investigating what it might mean to live through a woman’s body via the experience of listening to opera, disembodied–appropriating the subjectivity of a woman, powerful, indomitable, flawed and vulnerable to rupture, in place of their own potential sexuality or expression. What does it mean, then, for a cisgender white woman to derive comfort or sustenance from listening to the operatic voice of a white trans woman mourning the death of a Black trans woman, and appropriating/inhabiting their pain as a way of getting through the bodily business of breastfeeding while massively depressed?

I’m fascinated, throughout The Queen’s Throat, by the implication that the effeminate inversion or woman-identification of the gay man is inevitably a thwarted gesture towards embodied femininity–the in-between space of the gay man (or perhaps lesbian diva fan) is the extent of gender flexing. I am simultaneously fascinated by Friedman’s determination to wrap trans women into a more or less second-wave feminism. She quotes Anohni, speaking about herself:

“I’m a witch. I actually de-baptized myself. And what’s great about being transgender is you’re born with a natural religion. It applies almost across the board; no matter what culture or economic group or nation you’re from, you’re almost automatically a witch.”

Friedman goes on to assert that transgender people have a traditional shamanistic role in many societies (which? unsaid). She adds:

Koestenbaum says: “The diva is allowed to sing but not for too long; she is granted the power to soar in a phrase, but only under certain conditions; and when the voice breaks down, she does us how beggared and partial the terms of her triumph have been.” (127) He is bringing this up in the context of operas that are written to be unsustainable, which break the voice.

What does it mean, to be a woman artist? Anais Nin, who Friedman brings up to quote her on “The Sensitive Man” from Playgirl, had an illegal abortion to avoid being a literal mother so she might mother her art. The assumption is being a literal mother murders art. Amrita Sher-Gil, Hungarian-Indian painter, is, like Friedman, Hungarian Jewish on one side. She died at 28, from either a spousal murder or a septic abortion. Friedman encountered her work in India, where she was there as a white tourist in the ‘90s and was briefly shut inside due to Maoist fighters in rural areas having conflicts with the police.

What does it mean to exist in a woman’s body, which can be injured in so many ways by its supposed social purpose, and whose desires must be shut down, shuttered, to allow others to grow?

Quote from Koestenbaum:

“A tableau of two throats, Maria Callas’s and the opera queen’s, ends The Lisbon Traviata. While Callas, on record, spins “an elaborate web of coloratura,” Stephen, the opera queen, whose lover has just abandoned him, “throws his head back with her as she reaches for a climactic high note, but no sound comes out…Stephen’s mouth is open, his head is back, his eyes are closed. Callas is all we can hear.” By lip-syching to Callas, the opera queen is not brought closer to the magical realm of the vocal, the articulate, the expressive, or the open-hearted. In fact, the tableau convinces us that a passion for Callas has closed the queen’s throat, has taken away his power to love. While no sound “comes out” of the queen’s throat (the queen is reduced to the closet by his passion for the opera), Callas on record is singing Violetta, the consumptive courtesan. Stephen may regret that he can’t follow Callas into her hedonistic coloratura, but the subtext of Traviata reminds us that pleasure will kill Violetta as surely as, in homophobic scenarios of AIDS, it has killed gays.” –page 45

There’s something about the flapping throat, the open and vulnerable throat, silent but filled with someone else’s song, relating through the shared experience of obstruction, of desire, of doom, that I find poignant here.

A quote from Friedman:

“As illness clamps down on my shoulders, music becomes almost intolerable. Any noise feels viscerally assaultive, with the exception of certain string arrangements, one film soundtrack, and Anohni’s voice. It is like a harp, it is like whale song, and I need a small core of stillness within me to be able to receive it. With illness pressing down fast, I spend more and more time in the bath, where the hot water is almost scalding and depresses my sympathetic nervous system, and the mist of steam frazzles and curls my hair With my baby and husband in another room, with the thin evening light slanting through the window, I feel as though I can inhabit every atom, as if through the pressure of the water and the weight of the song I can hold my body together at least temporarily, not dissolve or fly into pieces. When this anxiety hits I find myself floating outside my own skin, wanting desperately to find a way back inside– but I have never floated above myself in the bath, only resisted the temptation to sink down completely. Outside the window it begins to drizzle, shutting me in. Anohni’s voice coils around the vibration of strings, protecting the sound like the sheath of a nerve:

Her eyes are underneath the ground

I have heard the crying sound

No one can stop you now…

But the crying sound is coming from outside the door, and Mike enters the room with a wailing infant, and I rise out of the steam and hold him gingerly to my suddenly leaking breasts, hating them both for interrupting this reverie this small pocket of time in my day that is psychically and physically bounded only by myself.” –page 45.

Friedman is interesting. I can say, I think objectively, that her prose is awesome–tight, evocative, composed, full of references. Besides Anohni, she talks about ballet, weaving-as-text, and looking on as her friends create magazines, struggle with broke-ness. The first and latter parts of the book feel slightly disconnected to me– towards the back half, in trying to examine the potential origins of her depression, she circles around Jewish epigenetic trauma (her grandparents are Holocaust survivors; she was paralyzed as a child by night terrors of ghosts and depression that seemed inexplicable but a dawning unspeakable sense of nameless horror over the horizon). She discusses her maternal grandmother, whose trauma as a woman in a patriarchal time is also relevant. Then she discusses–very last, and shocking– that her nice kind himbo husband whose connection to art is never mentioned, who tied her shoes when she was too pregnant and who spooned her in bed and was implicitly there in the background through the first portion of the book, is actually not there– sometime in her child’s infancy he took a job with the Australian military(?!!) and is gone most of the time, being in the military doing something with international relations vis a vis space assets. Friedman notes that she is critical of the military; her husband meanwhile feels he must be a part of it to feel he is giving back to his community. She attends a ceremony where he gets some military certificate and is paralyzed, crying. “I am flooded with a deep, deep sense of having failed; having failed to keep it together, even for one afternoon. Even more deeply, I feel the failure of not wanting this for Mike, of loathing the conformity and artifice and mindless obedience this ceremony has seemed to represent” (235), which Friedman self-effaces about, attributing her values to “snobbishness). Her husband and her had planned on an egalitarian marriage where he would go to work for a nonprofit closer to home and she would resume her art/writing career after a few years, when the baby is older–but she feels this probability evaporating as her husband’s career becomes more high-paying. The mystery of her postpartum depression, in this last chapter, to me, is more or less instantly solved. Terrifying! AAAAH! Whatever witches she has called on, whatever memory of women’s struggle, evaporates in her resignation, in her lack of resistance. Is this what Anohni sang to you for, baby? I call this the shoe-drop of the straight woman artist– every time a straight woman vaguely describes their nice husband, I get wary as fuck. Though she has been a voice, an agent, a subject, a storyteller this whole time, there’s this kind of horror story ending where in fact Friedman–apologies, Friedman, but this is the ending of your book– is subsumed into a structurally inevitable less-career-focused motherhood, rather than rejecting the structures that restrict her movement or expression.

Koestenbaum talks about assimilation, too; about the destiny of the closet, its inevitability, in a pre-Stonewall time when gay culture flourished but gay political rights were a matter of not being spotted. He feels his own opera-queenness has been obliterated by the opening up of other potentials–presumably, those of Sylvester, of Freddy Mercury, or of being a gay art critic. Not a drag queen, though he says “Callas appeals to the drag queen in me” (150). But he likes to look back at a half-invented past, at the bond between women artists and the gay men who aspire to their breaking-out. “Pasolini directs Callas as Medea, and she is attentive, obediently holding her hands to her face. These photographs attest to a specific historic configuration: the gay man venerating the theatrical woman and the woman responding gaily, the woman imitating the gay man and the gay man imitating the woman, the gay man directing and then listening and admiring, the man and woman collaborating.” But he also respects the moment that the diva-woman defies those who would direct or control her, such as when Callas walked out of a gala performance of Norma to protect her throat, defying the Italian president. Just walk out! Just walk out! You can leave! The closet, the structures. Callas said, “I see clearly what is right and wrong for me, and I do not confuse them or evade them.” May all women artists and gay artists see the same.

P.S

Can I just say– I love the library. I am a librarian. I love the library. I placed my hold on the Koestenbaum and the Friedman and got to go pick them up a couple days later, the Koestenbaum still bearing its pre-digital checkout record in the back (first stamped checkout in 1993, last checkout in 2003, presumably about when they digitized it). I love that this one copy of this notable book has been circulating for 33 years. Friedman’s book, meanwhile, is an almost-new paperback, its pages so clean and unmarred it’s like it’s never been read.

A Post- post-script:

I have met Koestenbaum just once, at the launch event for Lou Sullivan’s edited diaries We Both Laughed In Pleasure about six years ago. He glanced at me–I, blond and snub-nosed and trans, was wearing a Star of David necklace, and he asked, with a tinge of curiosity and/or suspicion: “is that real?” It was real, as far as you think Reform Judaism is real– partly because I had found in the strong bass voice of the cantor at Congregation Beth Elohim a real connection to the divine, and had determined to convert there because of its two gay rabbis and apparent political openness. Like Wayne, I am attracted to rabbis as well as divas.

The Lathe of Heaven is my favorite LeGuin book. I reread it on the train on the way to visit the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont this weekend–motivated in part by the cycle of catastrophic expectation circling through my daydreams about what the power-hungry patriarchal white men in charge of the U.S would do to other people around the world.

Something terrifying for many Americans right now is that the myth of America as a global benevolent hegemon has disintegrated further than many Americans were led to expect by their WTO-subsidized youth. It has been a long time since America’s vast military apparatus has appeared as a guarantor of peace. This International Women’s Day, Gaza is still starving under bombs; Israel is killing Palestinians in the West Bank and Lebanese civilians north of their border; Sudan has seen no relief; the Donbass region is still caught in the crosshairs of two militaries; hundreds of thousands of people who had been fed by USAID or supplied HIV medication by our proxy healthcare organizations are now sick or dead. At home, we detain mothers with babies, kill Rohingya refugees and white American nurses, and are targeted by police if we suggest we don’t want nature preserves to become militarized police training camps. Where is the figure of the benevolent father? Why can’t we just have Obama back, who had such a soothing voice when announcing strikes on Libya?

This war with Iran has a few possible justifications from the perspective of “benevolent hegemony”. An Iranian-American woman who was in my History honors program at University of Washington in 2015 messaged me on Instagram after I reposted information about the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab on Feb 28. She wanted me to keep in mind the thousands of people that have been reported murdered by the government and affiliated militias in the January 2026 protests against the Iranian regime. A Guardian article says the dead from January may number upwards of 20,000, though that’s difficult to verify; the government has acknowledged a few thousand dead and local doctors allege mass graves and people disappeared form hospitals. Some Iranian-Americans, with more or less monarchist leanings, have advocated for U.S military intervention, with the logic that anything the U.S can do to their country cannot be worse than what the Islamic Republic is doing already. It is clear to me that the Islamic Republic’s brutality towards young protesters is real, whatever the actual casualty numbers. It’s equally clear that Israeli/U.S strikes are not being carried out with the goal of protecting Iranian civilians; they would not be bombing oil infrastructure, causing poison rain, if that was their aim. As the Columbia Free Press says, nobody has ever bombed their way to democracy.

Liberal pundits express constant bafflement at the way our current head of state and his military goons don’t even bother to justify bombing other people by saying it’s for their own good. It’s hard to get used to the change. The New York Times is a dog in a hot car, panting: “why are we in this war, Mr. President?” Meanwhile, NPR has been running specials about the ancient ties between Persian and Jewish people (Israel and New Iran might get along!) and the apparently legitimate case the Pahlavists have for wishing for a new nationalism–in the apparent hope that the U.S turns to a monarchist regime change operation in place of the campaign of school bombings, destruction of civilian infrastructure and sectarian fracture which appears to be the actual strategy. As Pete Hegseth says, “the only people who should be worried are the Iranians who think they’ll live”.

The Lathe of Heaven (1971) is about a white man who allows another white man to dominate him–and through him, the world. It is about white men’s dreams of possible good futures, and their attempt to shape these futures alone. It is about passive collaboration with horrible murderers. It is about the breakdown of belief in powerful benevolence, in unilateral control, in a guiding hand one way or another. It’s also an effective critique of science-fiction tropes common among male sci fi writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s, and of the dreams they found possible. It’s a more compact book than many others of LeGuin’s, and–my opinion– the prose is tighter and more effective. Because the reader moves through a kaleidoscope of slightly different realities throughout, each sentence is load-bearing– it tells us about shifts between this waking moment and the last one we remember. I enjoyed the catharsis of reading this book partly because it felt like living in our nightmare news cycle. Each time you open your eyes, the world is different, and even if someone claims it’s for the better, it rarely is. You choose to go along with your daily life in the new world, where people are suffering in new and interesting ways, because you are at the eye of the storm– these new and interesting horrors never touch you, personally. You feel that you must break away from or destroy the tyrant who holds you in thrall, but you cannot.

Like Mikey in My Own Private Idaho, George Orr is a Pacific-Northwest-based passive victim of his own sleep– but unlike Mikey, his dreams reshape reality, rather than just reflect it. George Orr is a dreamer whose dreams are “effective”; case in point, when his aunt sexually abused him in adolescence, he had a dream where she died in a car crash that, upon waking, became the truth–six weeks past. He cannot control his dreams; he knows they spring from his subconscious, rather than conscious, desires, and he fears what they can do, even though one of his first effective dreams rewrote history away from a nuclear holocaust which had, in his original timeline, killed everyone he knew. So he’s been medicating himself into exhaustion. When his current reality’s authorities learn of his drug use, they prescribe him a “voluntary therapy” as an alternative to incarceration. Orr goes; there he meets William Haber, a masculine red-bearded “bear” of a man whose specialty is dreams, and who basically immediately attempts to control George’s dreams with a device he calls the “augmentor”. Haber then uses George’s dreams, which he controls, as an instrument to implement a range of “better” futures, all of which come with promotions and improvement of material circumstances for Haber (and to some extent George):

• Overpopulation is retroactively solved by a plague–Portland, which had been in Orr’s time a bustling city of underfed socially-housed sickly people becomes a town with lots of open space–space made by the death of six billion people, twenty years ago, in a “viral carcinogen” plague. In the wake of the plague, pollution is less of a problem too. George’s house is nicer. Haber has a new office with a window.

• Peace on earth is achieved– by aliens appearing to war with. George and Haber are both startled by this, because both consciously wished for peace– but all either of their brains can come up with as an alternative to war between “Israegypt” and “Iran-China” is mysterious extraterrestrials taking over the moon.

• People become healthier through a social system where they are allowed to euthanize anyone around them who is sick– which seems, in the text, to be a real dream of Haber’s.

• Racism is solved–by everyone, retroactively, turning grey all over. This causes George Orr’s romantic interest, a Black lawyer named Heather Lelache who was previously investigating the Augmentor and attempting to save Orr from his own attachment to Haber, to vanish. She cannot exist in a world where race has never existed. She later appears, grey, but with a completely different, more gentle personality. As a side effect, food becomes less flavorful too– this being one area of worldbuilding where I get where LeGuin is coming from but can’t work out the causality.

Unlike Anarres or Gethen, societies where LeGuin used anthropological imagination and invention to fabricate full worlds–which occasionally had holes stemming from her own lack of insight– this book is literally just set in Portland, Oregon, a place LeGuin knew about and could speak to. As such, her asides about architecture, public transportation, food, and climate feel deeply grounded in a way I don’t get in some of her early big-idea books. A thousand visions of Portland dance before our eyes: ones with turtle-aliens running antique stores, ones where population pressures have converted all those downtown parking garages into legal offices, ones where cafeteria-style food predominates, ones where trains are packed with people and ones where public transit has stayed shoddy. Mount Hood, green and white: Mount Hood, brown. There is a Portland where you cannot get alcohol because of pressures on grain prices and a Portland where you can keep whiskey in your bag. The realism also makes Heather– in her several states– feel grounded too.

Heather is a black woman who is not a protagonist, but becomes a counterbalancing force against the will of Haber. She is the only one, besides George and Haber, who can see the changes as they happen and remember previous realities, though less intensely than her client/husband. As George’s lawyer, she feels attracted to him because of his solidity– he does not “lean on her”, though he doesn’t know what to do to escape his evil therapist. In trying to persuade George to free himself from Haber, Heather accidentally causes aliens to attack Earth; she also tries to get George to invent a better, more benevolent Haber in his unconscious, and dream him into being. But George can’t really do that– a benevolent Haber who saves the world from aliens and cares about George a little more still wants just power. And George, who is passive when he is alone, needs Heather in order to act to counter in any way the monstrous world Haber wants, with him alone at the top, holding that power. How do we know George needs her? When she vanishes the aliens tell him to put her back; they give him a Beatles record. I get by/with a little help from my friends. Listening to the Beatles conjures Heather back, grey-skinned, into a world without race where she can empathize closely with George, fear for him, and be kind to him. Good for George! Haber frees George from his dreams’ power, attempting to take the power for himself. But he cannot control his own dreams, and he cannot derive power from himself alone. The aliens do not help Haber. Reality breaks; Haber becomes a mental institute patient. Now who is running things?

Orr’s relationship with Haber is undeniably sexy. When he’s being put to sleep by hypnosis and injection, Haber just reaches out a hand and touches Orr’s neck and he drops to the floor like a doll. Haber’s masculine certainty disturbs Orr, who is described approvingly by characters (and perhaps LeGuin herself) as being a “natural Buddhist”, ill at ease with changing his environment. But Orr also wants to submit, to believe in the certainty Haber has that there is a better future. Orr wrestles himself into submission for the first chunk of the book, convincing himself against evidence and instincts that the therapy he is being put through is good for him. But unlike how things might go in a feverish erotic fanfiction, Haber doesn’t give a single shit about Orr, either. He wants Orr to be grateful– because he wants to measure his own power to help other people somehow. He does not want Orr to escape him– because Orr is the source of his own power. Once Orr finds something else, either more feminine or more alien, to ally himself to, Haber will break. And that’s not sexy, actually, just sad.

The thing that frustrates me about this book is that LeGuin only gestures in the vaguest possible way at collective organization or to a program through which the world might genuinely become a less violent, more benevolent place. Human agency to influence our environment may always skew towards entropy…but the degree of darkness attendant on this must vary. It would be a different book if Heather had Black friends, or if Orr trusted more people. What we get instead is only a few waking, seeing people in a world of individuals destined to become statistics in Orr’s next dream. While she skewers the logic of warmaking, skewers eugenics as unsustainable cruelty, skewers the dream of a human monoculture, she too cannot picture a world where healing happens without a counterbalancing tax of some kind or where thousands or millions of people’s dreams matter more than those of just one man; the closest we get is a final world of uncontrollable chaos and the ragged remnants of past dreams where no people hold as much power as they once did to hurt in the name of helping. Decentralization and breakdown of power structures (where Orr can sit content designing kitchen implements) is the apparent goal. To me, it’s a bit of a lazy dream-ending to have in 1971, when an alternate Left organization might still have spared us Reagan–or attendant horrors in South America or West Asia or practically anywhere. Her perspective is that any programmatic approach to improving the lot of humankind must come from more than white men, and from multiple places– but what that might look like in action is still obscure. LeGuin saves room for optimism but can’t show you what she looks forward to. In some ways, there is a Tiptreeish pessimism baked into this book. Nevertheless, her critique is sharp and relevant as the day she forged it. A lot of Americans have this idea that it is up to us to dream a better future into existence— when we are the ones who benefit from the darkness we throw like ashes into everyone else’s world. Giving up that sense of sure control, giving up the sense that we must consent to the powers bestowing our easy lives on us, is how we let someone else’s dream have a chance of success, even if the way forward in that looks like chaos.

I’m having thoughts about the time-related disabilities of the queer male protagonists of Dhalgren by Samuel Delany and Mikey in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Here are my thoughts!

I watched My Own Private Idaho on a small laptop in 2014. At the time, I didn’t fully realize the film’s vision was so beautiful and surreal; I had a teenager’s typical irreverent cynicism about anything older than myself and I figured it wasn’t progressive because it depicted so much queer misery. I also couldn’t fully hear the movie, since it was being played on my shitty laptop speakers. I re-watched it this week at my local anarchist-adjacent community space, which is doing a queer film series. I liked the surround-sound audio–and watching it with an audience of queer people who mostly hadn’t seen it before and regularly laughed or gasped in surprise. It struck me that the movie was very centered on Pacific Northwest landscapes and places in ways I didn’t appreciate when I was watching it as a kid in the Pacific Northwest– the feeling of mist on a Seattle hill, the rolling blankness of wheat fields in Idaho against startling mountains, and the mixture of some kind of money/society with a lingering sense of lawlessness comes across more strongly to me now. And the soundtrack is a huge part of this sense of place– inaudible to me on my shitty laptop speaker twelve years ago, the powwow-style drums in the background during the campfire scene where Mikey confesses that he loves Scott are sure doing… something (as is the indigenous cop who pulls over first Mikey/Scott and then Hans on the same motorbike). It feels kind of related to the scene in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert where they are given care and a sense of social order by a bonfire-party of Aboriginal families after finding nobody else for miles–though the powwow-drums in Idaho might be imaginary.

Some kind of nineties nod to multiculturalism that is trying to integrate the whole picture, but doesn’t fully acknowledge that the violence the characters face is linked to the white-supremacist settler state which alienates. Likewise, the twangy country-western music playing in the presumably swank Portland bar where Bob begs, Falstaffly, for Scott’s favor, reminds us that we are in a society that might be sort of on the edge of the world, or of reality. It feels very related in its convictions about the PNW to Twin Peaks in this way– time and cadence of speech bend routinely outside real-world norms into the theatrical or poetic, and images carry spiritual weight. Women are sort of symbolic rather than real in this world centered on boy-capers, but it’s interesting that they hold such weight for Mikey, who sees in every woman his mother.

A young white sex worker with some substance issues and a missing mother, Mikey is kind of the perfect victim for an evil Dennis Cooper character. He panics when he encounters dangerous or stressful situations, sees visions from his childhood, and passes out like a fainting goat. He hasn’t died yet, because his buddy Scott, played by a teeny tiny Keaunu Reeves, drags him from place to place, setting up the next unpredictable and sometimes frightening world that Mikey wakes to. Scott, who is slumming to escape his destiny, is kind of just fucking around; he drags Mikey into assaulting Bob, drags Mikey to his childhood home where he’s assaulted by his father, drags Mikey to Rome and abandons him for an Italian girl. Mikey loves Scott. Scott takes Mikey to various places where they both have sex for money or get stranded on the side of a road, but then leaves Mikey, along with his street mentor Falstaff-Bob, in order to return to a luxe life as the son of the mayor of Portland, Oregon. It’s Henry V, but the camera pans out– more than Falstaff is left behind. Outside a narrow corridor of respectable masculinity, it’s The Wild West out here.

My first experience consuming Dhalgren was also haphazard–I listened to it on audiobook in a quarantine hotel in early 2021, a uniquely crazymaking experience, especially considering I was having absolutely no IRL social interaction for a week and there are large sections in the latter part of the book where text segments from earlier in the book are repeated. I didn’t fully get it, though I enjoyed letting the prose wash over me. I returned to Dhalgren this year and read it in full on paper. In Dhalgren, our nameless protagonist (nicknamed The Kid/Kidd by others) can’t remember who he is, only that his mother is (unspecified) American Indian. Delany, who is a light-skinned Black man, wrote a lot of racialized characters whose racial experiences are not exactly his own: an Asian woman in Babel-17, a futuristic “gypsy” musician in Nova. The Kidd is closer to Delany than previous characters: he’s a poet, a wanderer, and a cocksucker. As The Kidd traverses a semi-apocalyptic landscape in a fictional Midwestern city where blocks burn and rearrange themselves, he occasionally finds that more time has passed for others than has passed for him, and that events he remembers clearly don’t seem the same to others. Like Mikey in My Own Private Idaho, he falls into bed with sort of random men–though he also is in love with a woman– and like Mikey, he is used to falling asleep in bushes or outside and taking what comes the next day. We first meet him running from a dog with one shoe. Other episodes see him beaten up by street kids, employed by an exploitative white-flight family, and wrapped up involuntarily in a raid on a department store. The Wild West of this world (invoked both by The Kidd’s name and his supposed indigeneity) is its surreal postmodern collapse– the direction of its spiraling is unclear. Is it solar or lunar? Is it from within? Delany makes clear that plenty of people care for each other in the wasteland. We also meet a lot of relatable and identifiable characters, including a transfeminine performer who hates the way she is used by her boss but keeps showing up to work to prove something, but there are also frequent fights and disruptions to peace. In this world with no external enforcement of morality, The Kid is less morally dubious than potential rapist George or yellow-journalist Roger, and certainly less so than the middle-class family clinging to a vanished normalcy who pretends their disappeared child doesn’t exist and barely reacts to the death of their son. But he is not the same kind of innocent as Mikey.

in MOPI, Scott’s daddy is a disabled patriarch, distinguished in a wheelchair as he lectures Keanu-Scott, who wears a collar and no shirt, about his degeneracy; Bob, Scott’s replacement daddy, is made dignified by his shambling proud verbal cadence even as he is disabled by drug use. Scott returns to the world of fathers. In Dhalgren, there are not really fathers, though there are temporary potential mentors– Tak, though an introduction to Bellona and a welcoming crashpad for a night, is more interested in other young rough trade than taking on a boyfriend, George may not be a rapist but he’s hardly a role model, and the father-figure of the Richards family is a sick fuck who cares only for his own power. Mikey in My Own Private Idaho likewise has no true fathers to turn to. Mikey’s dad is either disabled by alcoholism or trapped by memory, and Bob is no father to him. Instead, his society is that of criminal peers, who may or may not guide him into the future. At the end of the movie Mikey is scooped into a car by a figure who may be his father, but it’s not clear that he’ll be safe with the guy.

Mikey’s passivity and cyclical experience of suffering–his ruin and sad beauty– is sort of the thrust of the movie. Made in an era of twink supremacy that was also perhaps concerned with the ruin of young gay men in an age of AIDS with no sustainable treatment, Mikey is the baby that represents a possible way forward foiled by lack of reciprocal love. This way forward is embodied by his dream of love between him and Scott, not-for-pay. It’s fundamentally the same dream as sex-work-averse Hirschfeld had. When Mikey is betrayed by his love, though, the question is if his fellow fatherless broken boys will prove enough community to sustain him. I find the movie’s treatment of young men as gentle, subtle, capable of sustaining hurt as much as inflicting it, deeply moving. As an adult, I also find the eccentric trade that the boys encounter more moving than sinister: the queen who is turned on by a Dutch Boy scrubbing, the German freak who also loves his mother who used to be a performer and dances with a lamp for some teen boys who look at him, uncomprehending. This movie, given its context, may have been about the sinister or alienating nature of private effeminacy, about the necessity of a loving masculinist culture, but what comes across is that gay men are complicated and kind of lost, and they want closeness with each other. Hans strokes the yellow bike after he does drugs and fucks Mikey all night; his hands on the bike speak to an unmet desire for contact. Mikey really only moves in one direction– to Scott, who then moves away.

Meanwhile in Dhalgren, despite being taken by surprise and not always sure of what is happening around him, The Kid has a certain agency in what he does and who he sleeps with, and emerges across the narrative as a sort of folk hero/villain in the eyes of others as he finds himself part of a gang of cyber-glove-enhanced rovers and raiders within the world of Bellona. His path forward carries him through varied landscapes; it is unclear if his adaptation to these landscapes creates more darkness in his own soul or others, but it does signify far more possibility than most people would see in the chaos of a ruined world. Lanya, his girlfriend, and Denny, his fifteen-year-old boyfriend, get angry at him when he disappears, and he responds with a mixture of infuriating avoidance and empathetic interest in how their experiences differ from his own. The kinds of crazy people that flourish in Bellona would not flourish in our world– they receive more patience, by and large, and more ways to plug back in to a community that changes shape as hierarchies of power evaporate. While things seem to just happen to The Kidd, he doesn’t need money in this world, and he has the ability to leave situations that no longer suit him, and to change the world around him– in ways Mikey of Idaho very much doesn’t. As time–which is somewhat circular in the book– goes on, The Kidd seems less like a hapless child. He writes a volume of poetry that is published by a bizarre visiting author, gets a sex-mad teenage boyfriend whose bestie/girlfriend is jealous, leads sometimes-violent raids on residential neighborhoods, and is invited by an implausible artistic elite to come to dinner parties. The unreality around him is flexible; his world is real, and things like extra moons and great big suns are seen by others too, though they don’t always remember them the same way. When he leaves Bellona, a young woman enters who says almost exactly what he did when he first came. His notebooks that he writes while there were also already written when he received them. Time, and the text, is circular. Just as circular as when Mikey wakes in the same place on a road in Idaho for the third time. Why does he keep ending up there?

Both of these stories are, in their way, queer macho endeavors, and also concern themselves with humanizing the homeless and insane man as a complex, loving and individual character. Women are on the periphery in both stories, though Dhalgren contends with questions of sexual agency between women and men and has interesting, active female characters and Idaho shows or describes women being trade, murdering guys, running off, and social-climbing (though their motivations for any of these things are a bit of an afterthought). It is fascinating to me how well Dhalgren sold, and I can only explain it by pointing to its sort of rugged individualism and to people’s panic, in the 1970s, about the potential future where they would fall from their Richards family perch and would be dependent on their own wits and on strangers in ruined cities after some kind of cataclysm. What both stories are about is how these worlds of cataclysm already exist alongside “normal” worlds where “normal” people live– and that ordinary men (and women) pretend that the chaos and destruction and entropy around their pockets of order do not exist. Time works differently; time as we know it tends to fall apart. At the same time, they’re inhabited, not wilderness, and they have an order and life of their own.

Am I a Disney adult? No (I say, like a ward). I didn’t even particularly enjoy my family trip to Disneyland in 2005. However, I am writing a science fiction novel about a dog-faced boy and a hoverboarder that is connected to my habit of rewatching Treasure Planet as a comfort movie, and I recently rewatched Treasure Planet for the sensuous comfort of Glen Keane/Brian Murray’s Silver, a fat cyborg whose gregarious fatherliness and criminality the film orbits around.

My conclusion, to my dismay, on my most recent rewatch was that this is a well-animated movie that is nevertheless not good. This rewatch, I really found myself unable to watch the last twenty minutes or so; the plot does chug, it moves along, there’s gold spilling, explosions, and skiffs skudding, but god, that insane robot is annoying, that dog professor is annoying, the catgirl captain all but vanishes into damseldom, and the characterization is so thin that only viewer projection–and the animators– can hold the pretense of depth together. I love longform critic Michael Barrier’s takedown of Treasure Planet and its near-twin Atlantis in terms of their animation and plot vision, and you should read it. There’s something satisfying about reading a critique of a movie I have enjoyed watching so many times (I disagree with him about Silver, but agree with everything else). I think his review, decades old, sort of inspired me to go to town thinking about Treasure Planet alongside both Atlantis and Tarzan to figure out their cultural context. Because they’re kind of boy movies trying to talk to teen boys, but they’re also kid movies, but they’re also kind of for adult nerd men being nostalgic. What are they doing? What is this moment in awkward Disney trajectory?

Tarzan came out in 1999; Atlantis: The Lost Empire came out in 2001; Treasure Planet came out in 2002. All of them feature a white male protagonist in a fantasy imperial setting; two of the three are adaptations of 19th-20th century boys-adventure tales and an attempt to update them for an audience of millennial children and adolescents, while Atlantis revives a more directly imperial-academic adventurer/explorer mode in the context of discovering an unreal, magical ancient race in an original story kind of based on Jules Verne.

This is a little different than some of the other projects being undertaken at the same time– it had been a hell of a decade for animated movies, and awkward diversity was actually making pretty decent strides. Mulan, released in 1998, had a tough but pretty Chinese girl action hero, drag, no princess, and an attempt (spotty) at accuracy in terms of its stylized depiction Chinese art and fashion, even if it also depicted the Huns as fantastically dehumanized grey monsters. Lilo and Stitch, also out in 2002, was about indigenous Hawaiian sisters who resisted family separation, and though it avoided directly criticizing colonialism, it depicted the racism its characters endured as a plot obstacle for strong girls to overcome. The Emperor’s New Groove (Disney, 2000) and The Road to El Dorado (Dreamworks, 2000) respectively deal with a pre-contact Inca society depicted in irreverent, inaccurate terms alongside a rousing friendship tale, and another European imperial fantasy about vaguely Aztec society that manages to be wildly racist while also emotionally flat. I think it’s useful to think about all these modes happening at the same time– 1990s multicultural diversity as done by mostly white men incorporating new aesthetic influences… alongside Tarzan/Treasure Planet/Atlantis, which were all chock-full of white-boy nostalgia for a kind of childhood media that centers them.

Glen Keane, supervising animator for Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, was involved in all three of my boy-imperial-innoncence movies– though was not lead animator for Atlantis. Something I find shocking is that this is not a gay man (or at least…he was married). He was the son of the creator of The Family Circus; his daughter is now also an animator and worked on Frozen. Cartoonist dynasty! But anyway, Keane’s men are hugely sexy and embodied, and they’re furry or animalistic often as not. In addition to designing the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, Keane designed Silver in Treasure Planet. He loves furry and muscular men. Thank you Glen Keane for your service to hot dudes in movies for children. John Pomeroy, disciple/brother-animator of Don Bluth, also spearheaded Treasure Planet and Atlantis’s animation, which is why the animation looks more Bluth-y– more rotoscopey and both natural/unnatural, less bouncy and stretchy. He did American Tail and Thumbelina. You know. Michael Barrier says the characters look awkward, like they’re actors; I think that’s kind of true, but it also gives the movies a sort of seriousness.

The “imperial” parts of Tarzan/Treasure Planet/Atlantis vary, and they’re notable for trying not to be Bad, reworking imperialism so it happens in another reality and trying very hard not to say anything racist by the standards of the people in the writers’ room. Atlantis, which takes place in 1914 (a year of lost empires if there ever was one), features an expedition to uncover a vanished culture which a bunch of obsessive nerds at Disney constructed to be as multicultural/neutral-brown as possible.

“The team was attracted to the theory that Atlantis was something like an island continent that bridged North and Central America with Africa. Hence, they built their idea of Atlantis as a sort of root culture. The structure of Atlantean drew from Indo-European and Sumerian branches, lending credence to the imagining of it as an old-world mother language that many other languages could have developed from. The architecture was inspired by Southeast Asian temples and buildings. The use of pyramids also connected this setting to an ancient time, since pyramids are some of the earliest large structures that span many different cultures.” (Jay Peralta, Film Cred)

The idea of that neutral all-world culture that is at the origin of everything is a kind of 1990s post-Soviet end of history globalist optimism if there ever was one– and, like the brown-skinned Earthsea or Gethenian characters in Le Guin, it speaks to a white-writer speculative urge to kind of erase race, to highlight its arbitrariness and ethnographic subjectivity as an excuse to, finally, transcend it. At the same time, the film centers a white guy whose naive search for knowledge will absolutely be of use to greedy empire-builders, kind of like Alexander von Humboldt but less self-sufficient. The mercenaries around him, as they reveal, are in it for money and power; conveniently, one of the most evil ones is a woman. The Atlanteans, once a race of brilliant scholars, have conveniently forgotten their own language; conveniently, only Milo can teach it back to them.

Treasure Planet is more oblique in its depiction of power, but the flag flying on the ships is kind of the English flag with bits on, all humans shown are white, and the grotesqueness of the myriad interesting other aliens is usually the source of humor (Jim’s mom comments “ew” when it is implied that she and Dilbert Doppler fuck, one alien speaks by farting, and Jim mocks the buglike eyes of a lobster-clawed pirate). There is reference to a “Terran Empire”, which is also the name of the human-supremacist space nazi empire in Star Trek’s evil Mirror Universe. What’s implied in Treasure Planet, which both is and isn’t set in the 1720s in space, is a roughly tribalist space empire captained by various species but full of semi-barbarians as well; the fact that we really don’t see more than one of any given alien species (unless Silver and Doppler are the same?) implies a really high level of trade, immigration and exchange, though the fact most ships seem built on a human scale may say something about power (none of this is being considered in writing, trust me). The only reference to trade is of “Arcturian solar crystals” that power solar ships. Jim seems to live on a mining planet of some kind called Montressor; he is harassed by local robot police. Though he has never had positive experiences with authority, at the end of the movie he inexplicably decides not to pursue a life of crime and instead join the Navy, who have not appeared in the film till this point. There is something interesting here in the disjunction between the context where Jim finds manhood–sailing with Big Poppa Bear Guy beyond the reach of society, real Whitmany–and the place the movie abruptly plops him at the end, where he maintains an order that has never loved him back. It’s one of the reasons it is not a satisfying movie. It’s saved and made watchable, at least on a first viewing, by the interesting ships, the weight of the characters, the cyborg and flesh limbs of Silver, catgirl eyes, and the slightly off-model movement that makes you invested in the unpredictable arc of each motion on screen.

Tarzan is the most literally imperialist– bad bad guy in pith helmet versus very good white guy who kills nobody at all and protects the anthropomorphic gorillas who would otherwise be victim to the intrusion of civilization. The family Tarzan feels with the apes is genuinely affecting, the animation is bodily, studied and real, and this movie yanks the heartstrings like nobody’s business, but nowhere in this movie do you hear anything about humans living in Africa. It is interesting to think about the games white children who watched this movie played. It sells you on the idea of the forest belonging to you, of you being able to be part of it, of your white person hair being capable of forming locs–of that even being its natural style. It’s so interesting that Tarzan is beardless, too. Is he pre-adolescent? He doesn’t have a razor. He must be young, a boy not stepped into civilizational pressures. He also seems to still be wearing the diaper his human mom left him with. Boyhood/manhood!

In making Atlantis, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise were trying to make movies “that just don’t get made anymore”, like Swiss Family Robinson. Trans men/mascs, including myself, have a childhood boy media nostalgia thing going on. I’m not even getting into the movies Hook or Sky High here, let alone Hackers. There’s this earnest attempt, in the 90s-2000s, to create a still-dominant but more-caring white boy through this kind of production, which then gets taken up by earnest adult masculinity-doers in queer spaces with either arch fake irony or cloying earnestness. I cannot tell you the number of times some trans boy has decided that he will write a queer adaptation of Peter Pan. Sometimes mascs are self aware about our childishness and think it makes us self-reflective (see this essay), sometimes we manage to be camp about it, and sometimes we are just bow tie imperialists who think we can claim vulnerability whenever it suits us.

So, OK: it’s the late 1990s. There’s some kind of insecurity around maleness. Can musicals fix it? Goofy Movie was already addressing these concerns a few years before, with generous, heartwarming musicality. Commentators have noted that Goofy Movie, with its soundtrack and its themes, is Black-coded in a way that my selected later triptych isn’t, though this is deniable/white-person-marketable because they are dogs with gloves on their hands. The Lion King is also about dads, masculinity and responsibility, and it also did awesome at the box office across demographics, possibly because anyone can relate to a lion. Hercules is also about masculine coming of age and acceptance in a community, though it’s confused about whether it is serious or joking. All these movies came with music, but in the late Disney Renaissance, that music changed. Unlike the blockbuster song-and-dance musical hits of the 1990s which preceded them, T/TP/A mainly use non-diagetic jukebox songs to tell a story as narrated by Phil Collins and James Newton Howard/ John Rzeznik (with the exception of the animal-centric scat/improv song “Trashin’ The Camp” and Glenn Close’s “You’ll be In My Heart”). There are quite a number of boyish coming-of-age anthems in Disney 90s, from the wry “Zero to Hero” (Hercules), the little-mermaid-esque “Out There” (Hunchback of Notre Dame) to the most obviously transmasculine “I’ll Make A Man Out of You” (Mulan). If we get to the seminal positive masculinity story A Goofy Movie (1995), our options explode, with “After Today,” “Stand Out”, and “i 2 i”. Among these bops, “Son of Man” (Tarzan) and “I’m Still Here” (Treasure Planet) stand out mainly in their determined attempt to be broadly universal, boy pop rock anthems, playing the emotionality totally straight and consequently coming off weirder for their efforts. You cannot dance to them, at least not in any way that involves moving your hips. You could (and should) do a drag king number to them. But if you had a girlfriend, she might kind of make a cringe face.

Atlantis has a largely orchestral soundtrack, composed by the same James Newton Howard who wrote the Treasure Planet tracklist. It’s like…fine.

My take is that all three of these millennium-straddling imperial-boy Disney movies center on masculine self-development toward bravery and emotional maturity, taken seriously and not in a tongue-in-cheek critical or fruity way (such as in Little Shop of Horrors, written by gay composer Howard Ashman), and grounded in family values. Two do this through a boy interested in a girl across a gap of cultural difference, and Treasure Planet does it through a paternal bond with a piratical cyborg bear who will betray and then save you, because you are so good. All of them focus to some extent on self-discovery and identity formation for the core boys, with an interest in masculinity and its performance alongside emotional sensitivity and connection to women (2D mothers or lovers). All of them also experiment with the use of computer graphics in new ways that enhance 2D animation (is masculinity computers?), and two of the three (TP and Tarzan) utilize this in the interest of animating cool skateboarding tricks, translated to movie-verse by the skateboards actually being vines or hoverboards. Skateboarding: undeniably masculine! I can’t do it worth shit. A guy I know actually was part of skate culture back then, and he says it was really homophobic. It seems better now; it’s definitely cool to do death-defying things.

Disney was going through a crisis in the late 1990s, and many nerds, such as Jael Peralta writing for Film Cred, think of both Treasure Planet and Atlantis as almost lost masterpieces, despite their broad release, because they were under-marketed and contain a lot of fun-to-watch animation. “On the whole, pop culture was outgrowing the childlike earnestness that encapsulated the Disney brand. Musker and Clements specifically served as primary architects of the Renaissance. They imbued the decade with their sincerity and levity, never really falling into the traps of tonal dissonance that plagued other films of the time that grappled with heavier material,” Peralta writes– but by post-9/11 2002, their formula wasn’t working any more. Dreamworks had split off, lots of projects were in crisis, and there was a generational-change thing going on too– earnest, wide-eyed movies were things of a few years back by the time Treasure Planet was released. The Atlantis team was trying not to be wide-eyed, but rather for a good-old-boy comics-fan adventure story like Indiana Jones, with, as the animator team t-shirts said, “Atlantis: Fewer Songs, More Explosions.” The latter two didn’t make the leap into the cultural mainstream. Of the three, Tarzan was the most commercially successful, second only behind The Lion King at the time in terms of box office revenue and appealing to “the four main demographics” Disney sought to capture (these referring to men/women over 25 and boys/girls under 25) . Treasure Planet and Atlantis are more linked both in style and in fate in the zeitgeist as artistically ambitious, studio-engineered flops during an attempt to change direction to capture adolescent audiences, where Tarzan ends up being classed as a late-Renaissance family musical in most people’s minds– a little iffy on the politics side given the white boy dreadlocks/transracial adoptee of gorillas of it all, but broadly more friendly.

I’m writing about these movies, which I think are interesting because they’re kind of trying to sell family-friendly white manhood to kids in a world that undeniably contained multiculturalism. I don’t believe in manhood as an inherent state, role, or set of traits, exactly; it’s more a rough social position I find myself occupying because of my patterns of desire. Whiteness is also not “real”, but it’s a position of power one is born into based on other people’s constructed disposability over time. There are all kinds of things that produced those patterns. Why did the retro white boyness of these movies speak to me as a kid and stick in my head? I was a tomboy whose tomboyness was tolerated, but I was not allowed to be Tarzan for Halloween; I was told I should be Tarzana instead, with full body leotard coverage and a bow in my hair for clarity. My desire to fight, smash things, etc, was a kind of aberrance. So I, as child, reveled in the promise of the boy alternative: being innocent-cute rather than bad when you are messy, being heroic when you are destructive, being strong, the savior, acquiring competence acknowledged by all. Getting to sing (or having Phil Collins sing) while you do it. The desire I felt to inhabit it or touch all that was partly sexual. Tarzan is erotic in the shapely naked animal innocence of Tarzan and his romance with buttoned-up but unbuttonable Jane; Atlantis is erotic because of its explosive steampunk girding and Kida, Helga and Audrey’s interactions with goodboy Milo, whether romantic or homicidal. Treasure Planet, owe the most psychic debt to here, has a hot cat lady but also does something unpredictably homoerotic – it centers an implausibly deep father-son bond between a rebel teen skateboarder with daddy issues and a fat middle-aged cyborg pirate beardog. Then the skateboarder goes home and joins the Space Navy, but sees Pirate Dad’s face in the stars.

The story that these three movies told about manhood is one which is comforting to a certain kind of man– centering an idea of a man who can feel something and still take on a role of admired protector, savior, and future patriarch, in a world where, sure absolutely, women can do something, but are not as important as men and will occasionally be damsels. I think these movies were made because the anxiety was that the embeddedness of that story was slipping. You can see it in their fabric– the strong girls are concessions, and honestly Tarzan’s abs are a concession to a female viewer too. I am interested in understanding the market that the people making these films thought they were making them for. There’s absolutely an adult male nerd audience that was meant to be sitting in theaters for these– and presumably children like me with families– but the attempt to capture the potentially-straying teen boy? Was it serious, at the time? Did they think they would?

Lee Lai is undeniably talented. In a recent Gender Reveal episode where the artist gives her current pronouns as she/her, she talked about her writing as “emotional journalism”; reading both her novel Stone Fruit and the most recent book Cannon, I understand what this means: writing a story centered on people whose problems take familiar contours, and stitching in the filling and frills with such specificity and lively interiority that readers can recognize themselves, even if they do not share identities or precise situational similarities with the characters and maybe act, or feel, with deeper reflection.

Indie/literary comix is an art form that is still, in my opinion, deeply powerful in being able to render story and history in a way not limited by staler forms, in a visual style more accessible to more people. It’s a labor of love to produce them. As a publishing industry, indie comics is plagued by demons of various kinds– a paucity of publishers capable of mass distribution, a poverty of consistent or well-paying work, an overabundance of bros combined with a kind of crabs-in-a-barrel mentality for many women and racialized creators–which can lead to a jealous, sneering approach to the whole business and maybe a darker, cynical attitude broadly. Even if you are a saint, comics can break your heart, like most other forms of cultural production these days.

I want to try to situate Lai for a minute among some works I think are thematically similar and similarly rigorous emotionally–that came out in the last few years and I think are related to its project. If you like Lynda Barry’s memoir work like One Hundred Demons you will warm to Lai’s journalistically rendered micro-interactions. Rani Som’s Apsara Engine and Spellbound both also examine issues of diaspora, lost love, family and friendship stretched. I loved Kenny Wroten’s Cannonball, and their more recent work Everyone Sux But You, and think they’re great expressions of what it feels like to be an angry, unfulfilled queer creative youth– though I find it striking that Wroten’s lesbian/masc protagonists across all their work are unutterably lonely even when getting laid and that there is no lens outside of self-sabotage and no escape from a world of cynical acquisitiveness or bellicose thrill-hunting. Wendy by Walter Scott (and sequels) sings with comic anxieties about artistic production, self-sabotage, and a cruel capitalist art world, but has occasional glimmers of light in an indigenous artist’s gradually increasing depth of practice and a gay sex addict’s capacity for personal growth. Archie Bongiovanni’s Mimosa empathetically tracks the breakup of a group of queer friends, similar to how Bechdel did with DTWOF from 1983-2008. Bianca Xunise’s Punk Rock Karaoke captures a queer-girl friendship-problems navigation around parents, boyfriends, baggage and creative cooperation that is alive with a kind of alt-Disney Channel teen movie vibe. And of course, when it comes to emotional subtleties, (queer) relationships and friendships, reflections on identity, and a well-turned line with an open sky of space, the Tamaki cousins Mariko and Jillian started this game with Skim, Emiko Superstar, Supermutant Magic Academy, Roaming, Boundless, and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me. Every time I open a Tamaki book, a calm focus washes over me. So too with Lai.

I think it’s basically about a sensitivity of character or connection to community.

In thinking about what unites my favorite comic artists: I like when people acknowledge a brutal, scummy world that can really drive you insane but which still contains the potential for human connection or liberate– depicted in panels which draw you along through both the ugly and beautiful parts of the world. What I see from Lee Lai is an almost unbelievably consistent artistic project centered on themes of queerness, family, the difficulties of intimacy and trust, and (often) food. I remember a comic Lai drew in what must have been 2015 or before of two chubby gay guys in bed together talking about their relationship insecurities while discussing a recipe for noodle soup. Their visual style was almost the same then; their focus and subject matter has sharpened in depth but remained in the same frame of focus.

I read Stone Fruit a few years ago. In Stone Fruit, two dykes–Ray, cis, Bron, trans– are effectively co-parenting the cis dyke’s six-year-old niece, whose single mother resents them both (but particularly the trans dyke) for the fact that their babysitting sessions are when her daughter has the most fun and is the most feral and alive. When Bron starts drifting into depression and hits a wall, partly because she feels shut out from true belonging in this family, she impulsively decides to visit her terrible repressed christian parents and sixteen-year-old sister in an attempt to reconnect or learn about her own past– ditching her relationship and the child inelegantly in the meantime.

The title refers to a general diagnosis that the cis lesbian Ray has for her partner– that Bron is soft, inviting and sweet, but has an impenetrable core that you can break your teeth on if you do not recognize it’s there. It’s one of the most enchanting, empathetic break-up books I’ve ever encountered and features painfully recognizable scenes of missed and lost intimacy, as well as a visual approach to rendering child-play and imagination as toothy and partly unskinned which I think illuminates the joy that adults can have with children while also stripping it of traditionally sentimental visual language.

Nessie, the kid, is acutely aware that her time in the play-world is temporally restricted and that not everyone can get there with her; she monitors the adults around her for distress.

I love this book; I saw in it a dark prediction of one of my own breakups and a reflection of ones past, where I am alternately Bron and Ray, closed off when I could open or intently focused on preserving the good parts of a relationship at the expense of delaying a reckoning that my partner or I must have. As someone who loves and works with children, it is a joy to read a book who understands them wholly as people.

Lai’s new book, Cannon, has artistic depth and interest outside of its use as a manual or reflection– but I enjoyed listening to Tuck Woodstock talk to Lai about what her project is and realize that she set out to do basically exactly what she actually achieves.

In Cannon, Lai follows a friendship between Lucy (Cannon), who is pathologically stoic out of a conviction it is moral and necessary, and Trish, a high school friend whose self-obsession and loudmouth processing habit isn’t visible to herself because Cannon spends all her time in the relationship absorbing Trish’s feelings but rarely offering her own in return. This dynamic is unsustainable. Unreflected, Trish feels alone. Meanwhile, Cannon’s workplace is grueling, her boss a creep, her formerly abusive granddad is declining with apathetic paid care, and Cannon’s mom, who bore the brunt of her father’s abuse, isn’t present to help care for him for understandable reasons that nevertheless place a lot of pressure on her daughter. Trish talks about herself all the time and fixates unhealthily on past breakups while keeping an eager FWB lad at arm’s length; she expresses her love for her friend and demonstrates she is actually paying attention by incorporating Cannon’s life into her art practice. Dodgy decision at best.

In another author’s hands, virtuous Cannon would explode righteously at her friend at some point in the narrative for her selfishness, and her friend would tearfully apologize, realizing she has been using and abusing Cannon’s generous good nature for too long. Not here. There is still a moment of eruption– but it is a moment of meeting. Both characters find they have something to complain about– leaning too hard without providing reciprocal care is cruel, but avoidance of dependence shuts the people you love out, after all, and noncommunication doesn’t necessarily protect those around you. Both women have problems selecting partners– Cannon, reticent, falls for a forward, directly-communicating bartender girl at work and rapidly comes to expect more than she can give, resenting her for flirting with their mutual terrible boss, and Trish beds down with a sort of awesome dude who’s ready for a relationship that she really doesn’t want yet. Both emerge as complex, messy women who need quiet, passion, care and peace, and who contain the power to deal with their respective situations.

Something I appreciate about this book is that it contains both evil and beneficent men– abusive dads, terrible bosses, loving boyfriends whose asses are clean and who cook even if you didn’t ask, coworkers who play bossa nova to lull you out of a panic attack– and sometimes guys who can be both, as in the scene where Cannon’s restaurant coworker who has a hot temper and can be a real crud helps her out in the aftermath of her inevitable explosion. It’s a cool-eyed but loving look at the world. As an aside, I adore the way Lai draws men’s bodies, particularly their arms and tummies.

Racism and the pressure on artists to make work about themselves, exposing their lives for a (white) audience, is also a theme in this book. Trish’s white lesbian writing mentor offers insight into using her identity to get funding, which makes Trish stall out; Trish’s strategy of using her friend’s life rather than her own speaks to a kind of self-protection wherein she also cannot safely expose herself or her life. Her subsequent drop of the project when Cannon finds out feels like a relief– and her beneficent mentor, who previously appeared a little sympathetic or hot, has a moment of embarrassing exposure when she reveals to her partner that she needs Trish to feel relevant right before Trish stops working with her.

Limited-color comics are more of a thing lately. I don’t know if it’s because of any kind of expense-related thing– certainly there are enough glossy bright-colored kids’ comics which throw vivid shit on the page just for the sake of it– or impact, but I like the way red is used in this book, and the way visual language is used to communicate something that Cannon herself has difficulty expressing about her rage and its connection to her grandfather– to her fear of herself.

For a book that’s just about friendship drama and which doesn’t contain a “bad end”, Cannon was gripping to read. Lai, for her part, represents a kind of community-focused art practice in a very individual medium that I think is genuinely useful for every reader.

The New Women of Wonder (1978) is one of the best anthologies of science fiction stories I’ve ever read, and it’s worth tracking down a used copy somewhere just for the foreword, where the editor Pamela Sargent efficiently summarizes the growth of dawning feminist critiques among magazine culture and lists recent contributions made to the then-new world of feminist women-written pulp sci fi by such figures as Vondra McIntyre, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., Josephine Saxton, and Joan T. Vinge. If you have been in a reading slump, this is a great way to get out of it. The range of genres is thrilling— from Betty Friedan-esque critiques of domesticity and the effects of misogynistic suburban culture on women’s brains, to “Dead In Irons,” about a slave ship in space, to one gripping story about an imprisoned galactic hitchhiker trying to stave off the advances of a warden while protecting her two boyfriends on an exoplanet labor camp, to a narrative about a sort of elf/goblin-like feudal warlord woman who is being used as reality television on Earth without her knowledge, each story offers something entirely surprising and new and eminently readable. A late favorite centers on a washed-up space architect whose patented genius blueprints keep being stolen and re-sold by psychics she’s trying to get to help her. The concerns of the ‘70s are bubbling up all over the place here. I was struck by the concern with TV/surveillance/privacy and with prisons, in addition to the more middle-class anxieties about marriage and men. Most of the women writers here are white. This book excited me so much and made me so happy that science fiction existed that I developed a bit of a hyperfixation. I wanted more!

As part of my exploration of women’s sci fi and speculative fiction I also picked up the anthology Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852-1923.

Had a great time with this Gothic anthology of early sci fi, spec, and "weird" fiction by women writers of the 19th and early 20th century. It's a wonderful cross-section of the evolution of tropes and really highlights how much of Gothic romanticism and early serial fic and short story genre is created by women-- and, if this assortment is representative, how much the anxieties of 19th century horror center on retribution for the extractive, individualist and rapacious destruction of colonialism. We got a Louisa May Alcott about a mummy's curse via flower killing a lady on her wedding night (which seems fair as the curse is retribution for the archaeologists burning an ancient witch mummy's body as firewood), a dude who winds up in the frozen Arctic wastes alone and sees a huge cool moonstone at the North Pole that he wants to steal, and can't, and which drives him mad. We have a HP Lovecraft adjacent story of a weird gray man moving to a small New England town who is also Death, but unlike if HP wrote it, this one is written in a way that's sort of sympathetic to Death and sees him as an ordinary guy trying to live a happy pleasant life in between wars. There's a great story about a curse from a woman brought back from the dead via electricity in a San Francisco boarding house, who would have preferred to be dead and so curses her rescuers with dying in the same room they resuscitated her in--and the room, reflecting maybe the architectural upheaval and geographic dislocation after the 1906 earthquake, then mysteriously follows the protagonist around San Francisco, no matter how hard he tries to move into another house. One ghost story is about an evil butch landlord who killed her last tenant. There's werewolves! There's a lot of wronged women! It's both conventional and paraliterary. A lot of anxieties about dislocation and the instability of happiness—marketable to a new reading audience, and also fitting with conventional occultism, fear and ideas about women from the era.

What I found of the pulp era was The Future is Female! Women’s Science Fiction Stories from the Pulp Era to the New Wave, a 2018 anthology that was a grab-bag of writers from the same period and slightly earlier. It opens with 1931’s “The Conquest of Gola”, about a planet Venus ruled by female super-beings and their gentle male consorts kept for pleasure. This anthology, in retrospect, gives a greater pride of place to LeGuin. I noticed that Joanna Russ and James Tiptree Jr’s stories in these stood out in terms of style and attraction for me. And then I went on such a spiral about both of them.

Russ’s stories have been available for some time, but Library of America put together a collection of them in that thin onionskin paper/hardback format that they do, edited by Nicole Rudick. I’m really grateful for her work.

I had been meaning to read Russ—Delany loves her so much, and he says more positive things about her in a huge range of essays than he does about almost anyone else. I was put off a little by the general reputation of transmisogyny that hangs around her book The Female Man— which is more complicated than the title may imply. See a great breakdown of its structural strangeness here. Its experimental, multiple fragmentary narratives jar and jangle together-- four selves, four alternate people, sometimes interacting in the real world materially and sometimes only invading each others’ heads. Janet is from a world that has other problems besides patriarchy; Jeannine is from an alternate 70s....more later. It’s like Dodie Bellamy, kind of. It’s kind of New Narrative. It’s very funny.

Many descriptions of this book describe Janet’s all-female world as a utopia. I think it’s a misapprehension to see Whileaway as utopia, though I think many feminist lesbian separatists probably read it that way and so that does become part of the history of the work. I learned from the afterword and chronology of Russ’s life that copies were distributed to every NOW chapter in America, and it eventually sold 500,000 copies. Whileaway—also depicted in the fantastic short story “When It Changed”—, is certainly Different than our world, not only because of the absence of physical men but because of its (lowercase c) communism, and it presents a vision for a completely different relationship to work, family, and freedom. A sixteen hour work week that feels oppressive because of the varied interests and intelligence of its workers, a strictly regimented communal life where mothers spend only five years with their children before communal preschool and education (including, notably, mechanics, wilderness survival, farming...) resulting in everyone having a very different series of complexes from childhood than we do in our world-- Russ mentions attachment styles originating in that first separation from a mother after a spoiled childhood. Monogamy, no, marriage, no, and a life of meaningful work contributing to the community before a creative old age with less to do. Technology, as in the early feminist work Sultana’s Dream, makes the ease of life in this future possible; “induction helmets” allow automated operation of industrial machinery. Wilderness is preserved, but safe; a universal culture connects all communities. Some of these dreams are characteristic of 70s sci fi-- no problems of racism or indigenous landback seem to be part of the multiculutral Whileaway, and a vague goddess which seems primarily like a genderswapped monotheistic patriarch reigns. All that New Age influence doesn’t, however, emphatically, result in a world where nobody dies or there’s nothing wrong-- just that the problems that do exist have little to do with subjugation by men. There are duels, and women do kill each other. Taboos still exist--notably intergenerational lesbianism, a taboo that world-jumping Janet breaks almost as soon as she can get away with it in “our” world in a scene with Laura Rose, a lesbian 15-year-old, in a scene that is shown as consensual if extraordinarily awkward. Whileaway does notably (with a big exclamation mark) have a policy of killing anyone who runs away from their work, and there’s reference to a cultural practice of people who commit this unforgivable social taboo leaving a note saying to their peers “you do not exist”. It’s also notable that the mental violence of patriarchy (in worlds besides Whileaway) is described multiple times in terms of men negating women’s existence. There’s questions about the world that are left--how do you get a worldwide monoculture like this-- but the world itself is more or less a rhetorical exercise, and it does some fun tricks where it appears. I like the scene where a child who is cooking via induction helmet is simultaneously telling a story about a woman raised by bears that’s informed by her social world, rather than ours, to show the difference in psychology that might result.

Jai’s world, which shows up very late, also has very historical-period (1970s lesbian separatism) typical details re: an imagined world of cis women vs men, which results from historical crisis, some kind of evolution of revolution and tech (there’s a convoluted explanation), cataclysm and women’s eternal subjugation, where it’s a warrior culture now, violence is everywhere, trans women and fags are subservient but still stuck in Man Land for some reason acting out the roles of women. Strong stink of Janice Raymond, a parallel JR who Russ corresponded with around this time, here spoil some of what else is going on-- though Joanna doesn’t, I guess, explicitly say that trans women are the enemy and doesn’t really imply this world rocks. I worry about the supposed materialist rationale for this world existing, and question her assumption that in this world there would not be gender renegades, passing men, etc. To Russ, “half-changed” and “changed” fags and trans women are not evil, just idiot victims…and yet the lack of allegiance is as always striking. Cis women in Jai’s world, of course, aren’t similarly victims--they’re quite brutal, and left to their own devices they breed brainless clone male sex slaves. Russ, unlike other radfems of her moment, shows these women as capable of enormous off-putting sociopathic violence. It’s all very very 70s again in terms of the potential of tech and the breakdown in utopian dreams. Jai makes a plea to the other women from other timelines to help the women of her world fight the men and shelter fighters—one gets flashes of possible 70s-coded events like planejackings— the drift from a maybe-never-extant utopian vision of feminism into a more diffuse and violent factional battle. Then Joanna, the narrator, quips that when this book seems dated, mysterious, goofy, will be when we know we are free. Well, unfortunately, it does a little, and we still aren’t free.

The strength of The Female Man is its irreverence, surprising patterns, living dialogue, and specificity of description around patriarchy in our world, with a mix of satirical comic scenes, earnest engagement with lesbian desire --and sex-- in a way that was still almost unheard of in popular fiction, willingness to develop, with acceptance of possible error, a feminist vision of alternate possibility. This was a moment of intense misogyny, when the women’s movement was derided in every paper (just do a keyword search of “feminist” on the historical archives of NYT to see what I mean). While it’s specific to the moment that produced it and the person who produced it, it isn’t as didactic and blowhard as many other separatist works, and while it is animated by a rage, it is interested in breaking through to the other side of things. What can come after this? What can emerge? It’s very fun to read aloud. It would be very interesting to read alongside Wittig’s Les Guérillères.

So I got into Russ, all the moreso because she pisses me off. She is the kind of woman who was justifiably angry at almost every man around her, but then is unjustifiably angry at people who have sometimes less power than her. She did not have internationalist socialist solidarity. She had in her youth what I understand to be a typical radical feminist hatred of gay men/trans women as a class that comes—quite clearly, in some of her writing in On Strike Against God — partly from an envious desire to experience faggotry and a feeling of divorce from her gender, or from any gender. I enjoy her interviews about slash fiction, her statements about Star Wars (correct—it is a masculinist fluff of cotton candy, without depth, and is part of a larger commercialization of sci-fi), and the general cranky rage she brings to a lot of interactions in the pages of sci-fi journals. I love Imogen Binnie’s essay about her impact and how her fiction made Binnie’s own possible, and Jeanne Thornton’s foreword to the new edition of On Strike Against God, which examines her transphobia and subsequent renunciation thereof alongside her contributions to feminist literature more broadly. I recommend her silly, punchy, barbarian-from-Tyre-in-space woman warrior Alyx stories, which change setting and canon each time.

And then I discovered this (HUGE) biography of James Tiptree Jr., also known as Alice Sheldon.

Anyone who knows me well will know I’m totally obsessed with crazy bisexual midcentury women. And Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr here does take the cake in terms of biographies that will keep you saying WHAT! I had read a handful of her stories. I love “The Women Men Don’t See,” “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain,” and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” But her own biography kind of takes the cake on any fiction story, even ones featuring (as she often did) love affairs with aliens.

Sheldon had a brief (relative to her lifespan) run as Tiptree, a very successful “male” sci-fi pulp novelist of the New Wave. I think living in two genders for a decade, even via fiction/by mail, does count as a kind of transness. I will use she pronouns here, but know that’s conditional on Tiptree’s ghost not correcting me.

Tiptree’s life really is a study in Americana. Her parents hunted a silverback gorilla for the Chicago Field Museum during one of their three journeys to central africa with young Tiptree in the 1920s, where the entire family journeyed with 200 porters on foot through equatorial areas during Belgian rule of the Congo; her mother wrote several books about Alice in Africa that she sold to papers. It’s all exactly as brutal as it sounds. Skip forward. She was in love with a lot of women in college; one died of a septic abortion, and others were committed to institutions. She married young into an abusive marriage. Her husband may have thrown her through a glass window when he found her giving oral to another woman. She was hospitalized many times until she finally left him, went to Mexico to study with painters around Diego Rivera, but she decided she wasn’t a good painter and left again. She was in the WACS in the war and did photoanalysis for where in Japan the allies should bomb. An airplane factory was destroyed on her intelligence, along with the school next door. She then was in the CIA starting in 1951, and was there when it did the Mossadegh coup (she wasn’t involved, just that’s when the CIA started coup-ing). She did research on communist movements in Africa because of her Swahili knowledge; this helped the CIA do espionage and coups in Africa later, though she was only at the CIA a few years.

Her second husband was a CIA guy. He is implicated in much. They didn’t have a good sex life and she almost left him, and maybe would have been a lesbian in a more overt way if she did, but he got her back and she did a PHD in behavior science instead

Then she started writing under a male pseudonym, and did this for about thirteen years.

Tiptree’s fiction was praised for its easy readable but stylish tone, its heroes that encountered darkness in the human spirit and in the outer worlds, and its sex, xenophilia, and treatment of interesting problems of the age. It was enhanced by his mysterious qualities— he didn’t appear in person to accept awards, and the number of reference to secret government activities led many to conclude he was at a federal agency, perhaps actively involved in high-up dealings. After his first few stories, Tip began to deal in feminist themes. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” is about a teen girl who is chronically ill and lives plugged into a computer, operating a more beautiful body controlled by a corporation. “The Women Men Don’t See” is written from a man’s perspective—a man whose character and qualities are similar to Tip’s own persona— as he is crash-landed in Mexico with intelligent women he doesn’t understand, who ultimately prefer the company of aliens. “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” is an effective mood piece about a human-engineered pandemic designed to free Mother Earth of masculine greed and darkness. What’s consistent is a certain fatalism. In a story about women from another world who are going to take over Earth and make it an ice planet, a woman on Earth initially plans to help them against male humans— but then is persuaded to side with men against the strong women. There is no future in Tiptree’s feminism— he (she) can’t quite dream it, though the anger and reaction to a lifetime of misogyny is there.

In 1975, in the introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, a collection of Tiptree’s short stories, Robert Silverberg wrote: “[i]t has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”

Ursula Le Guin became friends with her long before knowing she was not actually a man. Ditto Joanna Russ— Joanna had a spiky but mutual correspondence with Tiptree for years—sometimes praising “his” fiction and sometimes lambasting him for his assumptions about men and women. Tiptree responded with humorous, self-deprecating, and believably midcentury macho asides. Joanna Russ was kind of in love with Tip before she was outed as a woman, she said in one letter, but she’s also mad at her for not being feminist enough. For a certain period, though, they wrote each other at least once a week and Russ informed Tip’s evolving feminist politics a lot. One story— “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”— is a similar concept to Russ’s Whileaway, where a planet of women has learned to get along just fine in men’s absence after a plague wipes them out. After she was outed as a woman, Sheldon said that she thought she was a lesbian, but that at her age she would never be able to act on it. Russ sent Sheldon a love letter assuring her that her age would not prevent women from being sexually attracted to her and saying that she wanted to kiss her; Tip dodged twice. But she clearly also really valued her communication with Russ and trusted her enough to come out to. When she died, Russ continued working in sci-fi and academia until her own chronic illness prevented work.

I’m obsessed with them. There is a novel in here somewhere.

As longer-term sci fi nuts know, Tip/Sheldon’s life was cut off by her murder-suicide in 1987 with her husband when they were both “too old to go on”. The Tiptree Award has been renamed because disability activists pointed out that it is unclear if her husband consented to the suicide pact. She killed him in his sleep. That said, he was a CIA spook. Their relationship is interesting. He undoubtedly limited her, and they had no sex life, but she chose to stay with him. One read, compelling for me, is that the worlds she dreamed of inhabiting as a whole person were too alien; she could not pull herself into nascent lesbianism because it wasn’t actually enough for her. Another is that, like many smart women of her time, she closed herself off to female friendship and intimacy for so long that they became terrifying to do in anything but letters. Another take is that her domineering parents lived too long, and she felt beholden to them and under their shadow until her sixties, and then unable to escape.

More than MFK Fisher, Doris Lessing or Anais Nin, this woman (macho man writer) may be the craziest hyperfixation object I’ve had yet.