Fantastic Metropolis

Reading typically claims as much of my time as sleep does—if not more. In the year 2002, however, I had to cut back on the amount of time I spent reading. Although a small, whingeing part of my psyche seems convinced that the year’s intake of words fell to near-starvation level, the no-nonsense part briskly insists that when time is short, quality can make up for bulk.

Of the many excellent pieces of short nonfiction I read this year, Simone Weil Davis’s “Loose Lips Sink Ships” (Feminist Studies 28,1; Spring 2002) stands out as incisive, provocative, and timely. Davis examines the burgeoning business of elective labiaplasty in North America and does not hesitate to document the startling similarity in language used by upscale North American women concerned to make their vulvas “more aesthetically appealing” (which is to say, in conformity with the standards set by porn films) and that used by African women discussing the reasons they undertake certain practices of female genital surgery. Davis intrepidly notes that in both cases “beautification, transcendence of shame, and the desire to conform” motivate female genital surgery. Jennifer Yee’s “The Colonial Outsider: ‘Malgérie’ in Hélène Cixous’s Les rêveries de la femme sauvage” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20, 2; Fall 2001) provided me with a new word that has proven extremely useful. Yee quotes Cixous:

I am suffering from anachronia, it is a banal familiar fearsome mental disease: the sufferer isn’t sick, she suffers from the mental anachronia of her entourage, she is surrounded by blatant puppets, she is the only one to see that everything is reversed upside down, reversed and claiming to be the other way up. There is a general mental and semantic slippage. The demented believe themselves normal. Untruth has uncontested authority. Everyone believes what is not. Everyone unsess what is. The program is uninterrupted.

Cixous is writing, of course, about living as a North African Jew in Algeria from 1946-1956. Gloria Feman Orenstein’s “Journey through Mlle de Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre: A 17th-Century Salon Woman’s Dream.Country of Tenderness” (Femspec 3,2; 2002) utterly delighted me. Admittedly, I’ve been fascinated by descriptions of Scudéry’s salons and writings since the 1970s. Orenstein not only draws a parallel between Scudéry’s cartography of friendship and present-day computer games, but also describes the fantasies Scudéry shared with her fans in such a way as to remind me of Margaret Cavendish’s solipsistic “utopia” The Blazing World (1666)—only without the solipsism. And finally, Jean Walton’s “Female Peristalsis” (differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13,2; Summer 2002) presents a remarkable case study of the highly convoluted ritual that represented one woman’s struggle for control over her bowel habits in a culture that meticulously pathologized women’s bodies as a site of waste production requiring elaborate management by experts.

Since 2002 seems to be the year of the weblog, I feel compelled to mention at least one. Keeping a weblog surely demands a great deal of discipline and a willingness to stick one’s neck out (which willingness people may variously call courage, rashness, or chutzpah). My own first choice in weblogs is Ron Silliman’s; although the Language Poets are not exactly universally appreciated, I believe that many Fantastic Metropolis habitués will find Silliman’s posts thoughtful and engaging.

The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000) by another Language Poet, Lyn Hejinian, offers twenty essays on poetics dating from 1976 to 1999. This is prose of exceptional clarity and unrelenting thoughtfulness, leavened occasionally by wit. Talking about the gap between words and the objects and ideas they are meant to represent, for instance, Hejinian remarks, “The very idea of reference is spatial; over here is word, over there is thing, at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows.” Of all the nonfiction books I read this year, Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) is dearest to my heart. It rewrites the history of gender conflict in the sf genre as well as fully conceptualizes the genre as not only a collection of texts, but also as a set of practices embedded within a particular economic and social context. Pierre Bourdieu’s Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (The New Press, 1998) added another (much-needed) word to my vocabulary, doxosopher; hardly a day passes when I don’t use it to designate “intellectuals” bought and paid for by the corporate media. Terry Castle’s Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing (Routledge, 2002) is literary criticism of an easy style and generous, expansive attitude. Castle’s description of Charlotte Brontë’s fantastic juvenilia (only recently published in full for the first time) made me long to read it: “a work of dazzling, almost visionary grandiosity and brilliance,” her invented civilization imagined “so thoroughly, and in such precise and uncanny detail, that to read of its complex affairs is to enter a surreal alternative universe, akin to the fabulous world of the Arabian Nights, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, or the strange mirror-universes of Borges and Calvino.” Alas, the volumes, published by Blackwell, are roughly a hundred and fifty dollars apiece. Finally, I’d like to recommend Wesley Wehr’s The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West (University of Washington Press, 2000). As a young man in Seattle in the 1950s, Wehr led the life of what one might call a serious dilettante. He studied painting, poetry, and music composition and generally hung out with artists who either resided in or briefly visited Seattle. After every encounter with serious artists like Elizabeth Bishop, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Theodore Roethke, Wehr jotted down as much as he could remember verbatim of what they had said. In addition to offering a spectrum of attitudes about life and art from a remarkably unpretentious, genial perspective, Wehr also gives us a picture of the arts community in the small-town precursor of the city later (in)famous for bringing the world Starbucks, Amazon.com, grunge music, and rebellion against global capitalism.

Two chapbooks brought me particular pleasure this year. Common Ectoids of Arizona: Field Drawings and Notations by Stepan Chapman, “Doctor of Etheric Zoology” (Lockout Press, Milwaukee WI, 2001) (“who can be reached at his wild insect preserve”) is a humorous textual and graphic excursion through the imaginative landscape that is so peculiarly Chapman’s own. Kelly Link’s Catskin: a swaddled zine (Jelly Ink Press, 2002) takes us to the fantastic if grim world of a witch with a “passion for children” and a cat called “the Witch’s Revenge.” Like most fairy tales, it’s probably not suitable reading for children, even if it does end with the question “and who is to say that they might not live…. happily ever after, until all the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?”

I read some very fine short fiction this year. I particularly recommend Ian MacLeod’s “Breathmoss” (Asimov’s SF, May 2002), Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Wild Girls” (Asimov’s SF, Feb. 2002), John Kessel’s “Stories for Men” (Asimov’s SF, Oct/Nov, 2002), Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (SciFiction, July 2002), Bev Jafek’s “The Death of Sappho” (Thought Magazine, Fall/Winter 2002), Tamar Yellin’s “Moonlight” (Leviathan 3), and Theodora Goss’s “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #11, Nov. 2002). Three anthologies provided hours of pleasure: Polyphony, ed. Jay Lake and Deborah Layne (Wheatland Press, 2002), Leviathan 3, ed. Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre (Ministry of Whimsy, 2002), and Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, ed. Peter Straub (2002). Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2002) contains the brilliant, prize-winning “The Matter of Seggri,” while James Patrick Kelly’s Strange But Not a Stranger (Golden Gryphon, 2002) contains “Undone,” one of the best stories of 2001. Three collections in translation, Zoran Zivkovic’s Time Gifts (Northwestern University Press, 200) and Seven Touches of Music (Polaris, 2001) and Christina Peri Rossi’s The Museum of Useless Efforts (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), despite their authors’ rather different cultural backgrounds, share a similar sensibility, often exaggerating to bizarre proportions moments and experiences of strangeness most humans would, on reflection, find familiar, to the end of revealing aspects of human existence invisible to ordinary perception. Like all dedicated readers, I naturally did some rereading, too. I revisited the stylistically vivacious Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits (E.P.Dutton, 1980), which may be described as the opposite of a “cut-up novel”-being a collection of lengthy novel excerpts served up as stories. And when I heard of Gina Berriault’s death, I pulled one of her collections off the shelf to reread. A tribute to Berriault’s excruciatingly honest gaze and moral intelligence, The Infinite Passion of Expectation (North Point Press, 1982) examines life in West-Coast America in the third quarter of the twentieth century, elucidating the pain and beauty and longing to be found in every life, whatever its worth, whatever its setting.

I’ve already written at length elsewhere on the technical brilliance and political courage of Carter Scholz’s Radiance (Picador USA, 2002), so I’ll simply mention it here. For my birthday a friend gave me Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl (Eastgate Systems, 2001); it so enthralled me that I stayed up past two a.m. devouring it. This elegant, vivid work, which I’d characterize as Rebecca Brown meets Karen Joy Fowler, seriously revisions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “There is a kind of thinking without thinkers,” Jackson writes. “Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters.” Patchwork Girl is both story and metacommentary. “Mary writes. I write, we write, but who is really writing? Ghost writers are the only kind there are.” Two fantastical novels in translation provoked the wild side of my imagination: Lenore Carrington’s surrealist The Hearing Trumpet (Exact Change, 1996) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation (The New Press, 1997). Emma Tenant’s bizarre satire The Last of the Country House Murders (Faber and Faber, 1986) struck me as a version of Gosford Park according to Philip K. Dick. Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth (HarperCollins, 2002) and Laura J. Mixon’s Burning the Ice (Tor, 2002) are in different ways near-excessive tours de force of the science-centered sfnal imagination, the former mischievously playful, the latter almost painfully earnest. About Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount (Small Beer Press, 2002), I will say only, read it. Iain Pears is most widely known for his detective series set in Italy, but as someone who appreciates quietly reflective writing and a meticulous, careful understanding of intellectual history, I prefer his historical novels. The Dream of Scipio (Riverhead Books, 2002) interweaves the stories of three men at three different critical moments of European history confronted by the question of what obligation they, as individuals in a society under siege, bear to civilization. Anyone who enjoyed Pears’ detailed evocation of the English Scientific Revolution in An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998) will appreciate this novel.

In sum: I may have not read as much in 2002 as I would have liked, but I did enjoy the good fortune to have read well.