books I've read lately (last two/three months)

I'm working a job that keeps me in the quiet of the night while no one talks. It's a library of course, but I don't handle talking to myself well because I do it often. I shouldn't be and have been proactively reading more than I have in years. Things I used to love doing often are reappearing to me. I'm not writing much but I am at least learning stories that I feel do what I'd like to do as well.

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1) For Today I am a Boy - Kim Fu

I read this in the span of two days while isolating myself from most the world at my Mom's house. I was watching her animals, a paltry job, while she was at the Seafood Festival in Ninigret Park. I would sit for hours outside blasting I am a Bird Now and reading.

Back when I read Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson (the last time I had a major reading/inspiration strike me) I tried to plan a podcast around queer-aimed/focused fiction with the intent of critiquing whether or not representation matters (I don't find it to) or more hopefully, analyzing the ways in which queer people receive our false stories - what are they, what is it to be queered, and what will it matter if this is all just an illusion of our reality. Is there purpose in telling stories about stories about our selves? Can we really generalize queerness? For Today I am a Boy gave me those same thoughts.

The origin of the title became an important focus for me. First off, Fu is not trans and does not appear in her interviews to relate to queerness - and has a kinda shitty take in one where she equates it with "Asianness" (erasing queer and trans Asian people in the same way that phrases like "women, queer and POC people" generalize/forget that one can be multiple things and face the intersectional consequences of their surviving that set of circumstances) but it could matter less. For Today I am a Boy is of course the classic tearjerker Anohni song, and what Fu I think accidentally did for me the most interesting was terming acceptance/conforming ideas to ones identity - particularly when paired to their racialization and gender. It originated around language and dialect. Calls of questioning the main character's parents' speech patterns are noticed by them and called out by the parents but not dictated in the same terms of Their Eyes Were Watching God. I thought a lot about Anohni's voice and treatment of her gendering by critics and fans. They understood the voice as a novelty and the identity as unimaginable. I don't think Fu meant this but, whatever. I also cried a lot at the conversion therapy and shoes in the house segments because if you haven't known you haven't known. But how can you?

As someone who serves the role of a son for their parents, I felt a lot of connection too where the main character serves their roles and comes into fights with younger queer people (or their youth unmeaning to their understanding of other's fights and spaces that they must travel). And yet, the novel that I engulfed at light speed still ended in the tranny death. Paris is Burning in hell. This book is very good and worth reading/remembering for others.

2) There, There - Tommy Orange

Where this isn't the next book I read, it's the one freshest on my mind. I picked it out because of the comment of its reference to Sherman Alexie - who immediately was referred to me as having been ousted as a perpetrator of abuse alongside Junot Diaz, another writer of a similar vein I have in the past been fond of. Because I don't know how to process the abuses I've undergone, I don't know how to always trust I react to instances of abuse appropriately. It's been haunting me lately. I question my motives and ability to critically undermine the society at large whilst protecting those who are harmed by any and all persons and their relationship to their own traumatic undoing. While recognizing people who harm as people nonetheless. I also find my relationship to men as troubling to make so simple as others do. Often I can point at easy instances of homophobia instead of the relation of their emotionally or physically absent/abusive father narratives that some claim. I love Spoonboy's Stab Yer Dad though. "We're all born to fiction, daily recreated."

Which is important to the book. Not really the Spoonboy reference.

I kept referring to its possibility of being magical realism as I was asked about There, There, which is me maybe just feeling bad for not reading much Marquez, and it mirroring Roberto Bolaño or Thomas King for me. More accurately, the book examines systemic causes for abuse, addiction, dependence and erasure. I don't know if I trust all of which Orange does - for instance that all his characters all questioning their authenticity of being Indian enough (and need to remind myself that it could fuckin' matter less what I think) - but I see the intent and history I knew and didn't to be something I look at and have to learn from. I will never experience indigeneity in my home land beyond the one I'm colonizing by existing in it. And what does that mean to gentrification - the city, as Orange puts it in some of his commentary on the piece, is a new part of the environment. Don't know if I believe it yet.

A discussion with an anarchist friend and complicated character while they were in town related me to a conflict they had in a decolonization motion at their new home among other issues of communal rural life. The act of who has the power to usurp something larger than a legacy came by the moment. We never finished that talk but searched to process why things cannot just happen with ease on hope and prayer of recognizing place, purpose and intent. There's more to this conversation and its purpose to me connecting it here, but it can't happen here. I'm already a security culture risk enough, a risk to my friends for my blanched disreality and disrepair. I question often if how I affirm others' indigeneity and process through their worlds by me is enough. Truth is it won't ever be but you know, we don't stick around for endings like that.

This book ends by hitting you with a fucking brick and I recommend you prepare yourself for it. It tells you what will happen for the last hundred pages, but knowing an ending will never spoil the experience of reaching it. Maybe. That sounds like sage advice that I'm inept to give.

Oh and it's not magical realism. Just real. A reading that I wanna plug more than pair to this is Vanessa Watts' "Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!)" which I thank Sadhana for showing me because goddamn if place-thought doesn't enter my consciousness daily. Overall, the story doesn't care to answer why violence will happen intra-communally or whether it matters its reader gets to know a solution. Some things aren't easy and are historically overwhelming.

3) The Killing Joke - Alan Moore / The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller (& a quick rundown of some other comics)

Holy shit I love comics. I don't talk about my time of webcomic devoteeing through all of middle to mid-high school because I was an embarrassingly unfindable object then. I spent hours on forums embarrassing myself for being young, lonely and ignorant. But I didn't have anyone to talk to about my identity til I started coming out there or making friends, or accurately: attachments, to these anonymous people who I made real and found myself connecting too much to with having few understandings of the position I was putting some in as a child in a sea of young adults. Late last year I found myself added back on my Facebook that has exchanged names by a person with a username abstracted who I think was lonely, who I had made my like fictional sexual head fantasy albeit his being vastly older than my underage self of the time and not actually having any pictures of himself. I couldn't handle more than admitting that to him and disappeared from that conversation as fast I could. Comics where were I learned how to pace works, especially in my horrible "comedy strips" which were a mess. I do distinctly remember someone stating my horror work that followed to be better and there is an unfinished non slice-of-life but stream-of-consciousness MS Paint stylistic comic that was one of my last ones that I honestly did real good on. That doesn't matter much. I could never find a style of my own when it came to art, and now is no different. I can only draw me.

Something I do sometimes talk about though is how I have a strong nostalgic connection to Alan Moore - or even more precisely, how I connect Watchmen to System of a Down's self titled album because I bought both at a Borders at age 13 and they changed my life. That album fucking rips. I read the whole thing while listening to PLUCK fuck me up in ways I wasn't prepared for but have never recovered from.

Anyway, The Killing Joke is not as good as The Dark Knight Returns. There's not that much to say about it. It's the pacing of it, and as for the violence (as you know I am obsessive to it)...it's amateur and spiteful in both. I haven't bothered with more than the movie of Sin City (and won't bother) as far as Miller goes, but I've read over and over again V for Vendetta and From Hell and Watchmen and I hate those movies but goddamn I love those movies and books. Moore is also a prick in a lot of ways who has shit out a bunch of trash on the page that I refuse to even try to critically come to, because it's not worth it. It's funnier to treat him as a wizard (go look it up) who hates capitalism (iffy source on that one mate) and comics.

I'm not going to document too much of the other comics I read because there's been so many - I have ordered comics in from other libraries. But here's a quick list of things I don't need to cover too much:

• Unterzakhn - Pretty good but forgettable. Kind of just like Persepolis but without as many funny moments.
• Chicken with Plums - Speaking of Satrapi, this is good but once again doesn't have enough bite. Some parts are really touching and unique though. Certainly worth reading.
• Shoplifter - This book was fine but I couldn't care less about it. A story that kind of went nowhere.
• Killing and Dying - I love Adrian Tomine and you have to make fun of me for it. This collection is maybe better than Summer Blonde. He has a problem with women that he admits to all the time, but I don't know if it makes him get better at it.
• Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron - Akin to Moore, I am obsessive when it comes to Daniel Clowes and I can't help it. Two years ago I dressed up as Enid's punk outfit for Halloween (I died my hair puke-green and wore a white T shirt is that really dressing up, like come on now). This book is classic Eightball style Clowes where he says edgy shit and gets surreal. Play a game with yourself where you have two pieces of art, one by Charles Burns and one by Clowes and see if you can tell which is which. I have never gotten it wrong, but is it actually hard? Who could care less.
• The Education of Hopey Glass - I don't have enough to say about this and wish I did beyond I almost bought every Love and Rockets edition and searched up original inked pages to put on my wall. Love and Rockets is my favorite comic I always forget about. My profile pictures are either stock photos or Maggie or Hopey so it will kind of always be a piece I'm glad to have touched on.
• Are You My Mother? - Okay so I saw the Fun Home musical for free at the end of my college days and also just want to say, I should have dedicated more care to this and written something for it. It's not better than Fun Home...or even as good...but it's also a complex take on psychoanalysis which I'm indebted in my crazy head to (fuck you Lacan for making sense to my 18 year old brain because now I can't undo your damage). I need to follow this up by reading some Woolf, beyond the Things Fall Apart song where they just scream her suicide note. Jeez. Still real fucking dark (and not okay). Also no one will remember that band.
• Blue is the Warmest Color - I refuse to watch the movie of this. It's also not a great comic. It's not bad and I did cry but it's forgettable compared to some other "the gay dies at the end" moments and those didn't make me have to consider the predatory nature/conflict in queerness alongside the need to address that in queerness age is sometimes a fuzzy feature - which sounds like but isn't some regressive Ginsberg shit (fuck you Ginsberg you Howling shithead). I know the feeling of being a young fag and wanting an older one to show you a way to yourself. I have experienced it and seen plenty others do the same. It isn't as easily cut and dry as predatory and abusive but nothing can be. How do we still protect young queers from being taken advantage of in their quest for feeling loved at all. Unsure. I worried about this often with my students at a middle school - the queer kids using my lunchroom as a safespace (it's not the time or place to argue this term) and me never knowing how out of the room they could be, and how guilty I am to not be able to provide them that. Then or now. I am not sure when things will change beyond a collective intentional movement to do such defenses against exploitation and trauma. Can we and should we? This was a long unhelpful rant. In any case the movie's spoiled by lesbians (this is a joke but also not) and real life violence (the actual ruin) and the book by cultural complication/having a weak drive to say anything too specific/direct/lasting/thematic/whatever word I mean.
• Spinning & On a Sunbeam - I should have written more but cried a lot instead. Spinning is gorgeously humbling. Sunbeam is okay but sappy. Walden wrote a really good memoir that you should pick up if you can.
• Boundless - Tamaki is good and continues to be good. This one was what it was always going to be - a bunch of short vignettes, which is a category of comic that is low to surprise. It didn't depreciate anything.
• Eternity Girl - Not much to say but I read it and the base concept is cool. It's a very superhero-y comic which is fine. It's not gotta do more if it doesn't wanna.

Apparently this Catholic University school library has a copy of a Samuel Delaney comic book which is bizarre (they also have a bunch of his books on the shelf) that is currently missing but fuck you, I gotta read that shit. I'm also in the middle of the complete Hothead Paisan which I have loved for years. Apparently there's gonna be a sequel to Sacred Heart as well. Disconnected thoughts, but I love comics.

I don't make much art anymore in general (it is hard to phrase how my head has worked over the last 2 years and I feel estranged at times to it - art and myself and whether I am worth or it is worth creating things) but have had an itching to go back to a medium that is hands on and image based. The comic about the headless shirtless man I have drawn for years (based off Daniel Johnston's I Had Lost My Mind character of course - but they lost their head!, 1 upping you, Danny). A collage too sits on my mind for something I'd like to create, of massing images of found abstract pieces to a greater image of my own making. I want to create something fucking weird. Perhaps I will.

- - -

I also read The Elephant Man and only thought of its racist slur in it in the context to see if it was even saying anything. Nah. So it's not worth talking about. Here's some stuff I didn't finish/probably won't soon:

• Breaking Bread - Cornel West & bell hooks (There's a part where they tell the reader to read it at random sections and because it's just a transcribed lecture I feel like I'd rather just listen to it.)
• Maud Martha - Gwendolyn Brooks (Sorry I keep trying but just am not in the mood for it right now.)
• The Black Jacobins - CLR James (I'm reading solely to try and introduce myself and thought that Beyond the Boundary was weird but something I should be reading? Theory is hard and specific. It's like how I've always ignored the middle of Differance.)
• Mutual Aid - Petyr Kropotkin (Make fun of me, please.)

And here's some books in my current reading list:

• Black Skin White Masks - Frantz Fanon
• The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon (I have never finished any long form Fanon so I'm trying to do them all. He writes like a literary writer which is really neat.)
• The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat
• The Conquest of Bread - Petyr Kropotkin (I did say make fun of me.)
• Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami (There's a lot of Murakami in the hallway)
• Frankissstein - Jeanette Winterson
• Exhalation - Ted Chiang
• Fire! (I have only read Sweat and Smoke, Lillies and Jade so going to try to do the rest)
• ...and I really want to check out Free Sh!t but don't think the library will get that or BTTM FDRS.