The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2018, part 18: Carrie Devall

Pleasures of 2018

 by Carrie Devall

I should be able to say I read a lot of good books this year by people whose names you'll know, because I bought them with every intent to read them this year. Of course, they ended up in nice stacks with books I bought in 2017. A New Year's resolution to get through the stack without distraction might be in order.

Instead, I spent most of my free time either catching up with the news or studying Finnish somewhat obsessively. I've been running a conversation/study group, watching the very random TV shows and videos available for free here in the U.S. (Au Pair reality shows, soap operas, WWII and wildlife documentaries), and reading books for Finnish toddlers. 

Though of course I would love to read my favorite Finnish novels in the original, it would be nice to be able to at least read Anku Ankka (Donald Duck) comics without having to look up every other word. Currently, I am able to read books along the lines of Richard Scarry classics and news headlines better than Google Translate, but that's not saying much.

I did manage to do some other reading, especially in the beginning of the year, mostly getting to fiction from 2016 and  2017. Early on, I used one of the President holidays to enjoy Sam J. Miller's The Art of Starving in one or two long sittings. The style was strong and fresh, and the core of the book rang true, especially in centering the power and control issues involved in eating disorders. I bought Blackfish City, but have not gotten to it because hardbacks are not great for standing-room- only commutes. My girlfriend liked it, though.

I also finally got to Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz, and found it engaging and slightly reminiscent of several of Melissa Scott's novels. Sometimes a geeky swashbuckling gene pirates type of story really hits that spot.

I also enjoyed Malinda Lo's A Line In the Dark, both for the dark teen drama and murder mystery.

2018 was a good year for diverse movies and TV, from Black Panther onward (which other people have covered adequately all year.) Apparently a Time's Up study of the 350 top-grossing films released worldwide from January 2014 to December 2017 just found that films with female leads earned better global grosses than the much more prevalent films with male leads. Also, films that passed the Bechdel test also earned higher. Who would have guessed, huh.

I like to learn about how movies were made as much as watch them, and root for new writers and directors to manage to keep working against all the odds. One of the highlights of trolling through the crowded fishbowls full of podcasts this year was finding "Don't @ Me," a podcast hosted by Justin Simien, the creator of Dear White People, through public radio station KCRW. I found this while looking to see what writer/director Cheryl Dunye had been doing lately, as I've done from time to time since she wrote, directed, and acted in Watermelon Woman. The meaty, funny interview of her hooked me in, but the podcast has continued to bring a variety of great TV and film 'creatives' as guests. The discussions are engaging and frank, and cover how the guests got their start, the background for their films/shows, what's next, and lots of dirt about the business. A short list includes Lena Waithe (The Chi, Master of None), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Zazie Beets (Atlanta, Deadpool 2), and Ava DuVernay (Selma, Wrinkle in Time, Queen Sugar).

Along similar lines, I love to listen to people really delve into their reading and reception of a movie or book that has a lot of layers. The discussion of the movie Sorry to Bother You on episode 323 of the "Geek's Guide to the Galaxy" podcast, with Evan Narcisse, Tananarive Due, and Craig Laurance Gidney stood out in this respect. I had been wanting to see this movie since the trailer came out, and stalked reviews, but conflicts kept coming up when I thought I might go. Their discussion was a nice stopgap while stuck doing boring tasks.

I also discovered the debut movie of writer/director Desiree Akhavan, Appropriate Behavior, from 2014, just in time to see it before her latest, the adaptation of The Miseducation of Cameron Post. She also acted in Appropriate Behavior, and it's a blast back to the style of autobiographical independent films like Go Fish (but better). It showed great promise, but I was still pleasantly surprised by how gripping the film of Cameron Post was despite the horrible setting (a residential conversion 'therapy school'). I more recently read the novel, to see what was different and how it ended. It made me appreciate the movie that much more for how it used the physicality and visual subtext capability of film to deepen the conflict and irony.

I skimmed a lot of nonfiction about climate change and related topics. In searching for books, I randomly picked an older biography, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, by William Souder. I don't know how this stacks up against other biographies of Carson, but it was interesting in terms of its focus on her writing style, how she developed her books (particularly The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring), and how she navigated the publishing industry to try to make a living as a writer. The machinations of the chemical and other industries to turn the media against Silent Spring were amazingly disorganized and amateurish compared to today. The story of how she fought back, even as she fought the cancer that killed her, was a reminder that having solid research and shocking people with the bare facts is no longer enough.

A random documentary I enjoyed on DVD, from the library, was Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, from director Catherine Bainbridge in 2017. The music is great, from Link Wray, Slash, Jimi Hendrix, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and others.

Last but not least, speaking of great music, my teenaged niece graced me with a visit this summer, tagging along with my parents. I was terrified of boring her to death (even though she is a good sport), but I managed to get some of the scarce tickets for West Side Story as revamped by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. My niece was taking a day off from her summer internship at a theater, and is a big fan of Rent and Hamilton. I was worried that West Side Story would be too dated for her. I also wondered how it played in 2018. However, the new choreography of Maija Garcia and the diverse casting brought it out of the dusty past, and Bernstein worked his magic to score Auntie a few points. Not being able to get "I Feel Pretty" out of my head is a small price to pay.

Carrie Devall writes from Minneapolis, MN, where it rains a lot thanks to global warming.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2017, pt. 21: Carrie Devall

 

 

Pleasures of 2017

by Carrie Devall

This has been a very long and yet very short year. I did a lot of reading but much was for work, or to understand how this particular sociopolitical moment came to fruition. I watched a lot of bad TV, dubbed, to improve my Spanish for work. However, the bright spots shone that much more brightly this year.

One fiction series that I read to bookend the year was Binti and it's sequel, by Nnedi Okorafor.  I picked Binti up because it was short, not realizing the compressed story would pack such a wallop.  I am not a big fan of first contact and alien communication stories, until I read one that hits home.  Binti did this, dense in the best science fictional sense, and full of possibilty despite horrific perils.  The sequel, Binti: Home, went off in a different direction but did not let up on either possibility or realistic jeopardy.

I reread Malka Older's Infomocracy in anticipation of the sequel coming out in September, to be able to pay more attention to the worldbuilding and political details.  I was glad I did, though in both readings it took me a long time to get into the story while commute-reading in short stints.  This was also true of Null States, the sequel.  

However, each story started moving along, in worlds rich in both small details and political intrigue.  Whenever anyone says they wish someone would write a story about what comes next after this political chaos/standoff, I say, "Read Malka Older." The intriguing concept of microdemocracy and its up and down sides are illustrated with a variety of characters spread across some very different settings.

I spent a lot of 2017 immersed in Finnish language and cultural products, spurred on by the idea of another truly world Worldcon and by my ongoing infatuation with Finnish and Estonian literature.  Briefly, in August, I got to spend a week immersed in the real deal, attending my first Worldcon and hiking around Helsinki, nearby Nuuksio National Park, and neighboring Tallinn, Estonia.

We saw lots of cool sights, but the highlight of the sightseeing was the chance to experience extensive and affordable public transit while the Minnesota legislature was trying to defund our city transit.  Other highlights of Helsinki were old buildings and finding lots of good vegan food thanks to foodies, fads, and Nepali refugees.  We had an interesting conversation about American politics with guys who ran one Nepalese restaurant, after they graciously let us eat and run at closing time.  We discussed tasty recipes across the language barrier at a fancy Finnish local foods vegan restaurant in off hours. I made some people laugh with me about my very limited Finnish abilities, and fooled a few people until I became quickly tongue-tied.  We discovered the Gandhi-inspired Vegan Inspiratsioon nestled amidst the graffitied medieval towers and churches.

 

A highlight of Worldcon 75 was the many translation and world sff panels at the con, though they filled up quickly.  The chance to attend multiple panels with Johanna Sinisalo talking and reading her work in both Finnish and English was the main reason I saved up for this trip. I was not disappointed. I learned a lot about many of the more obscure-to-a-non-Finn references and weirder aspects of her novels. The Iron Sky sequel trailer was an unexpected pleasure.

Many of the Worldcon panels are posted on YouTube. I spent a lazy weekend watching these and have to recommend the interviews with Johanna Sinisalo and Nalo Hopkinson, for starters. Scott Edelman also did an in-depth interview of Johanna Sinisalo for his Eating the Fantastic podcast, along with many other interviews of a great selection of writers.  He asks good questions.

Not to be a broken record, but I got the chance to see many Finnish films and listen to Finnish folk music this year thanks to Suomi 100 events, for the 100th year of Finnish independence. Finnfest was in Minnesota this year.  I went to see a coworker rock on the mandolin along with some very talented musicians playing traditional instruments like the kantele. (We also got to meet the 'true' Santa, but the record 90+ degree September heat was too much for his reindeer.) The films I saw were all quite good, with an often subtle and sly sense of humor and humanism that were appreciated by the Minnesota audiences.  

Probably the best was Love and Fury (Syysprinssi, 2016, directed by Alli Haapasalo and shown at Finnfest). It did a good job of conveying a sense of 80s art/lit and political scenes and their oppositional style.  I liked how the 80s was evoked by ideas, not pop music or clothes, though these were not absent. The film seemed at first (and from the trailer) to be a study of a flashy, narcissistic, and well-funded male writer and his mental struggles.  However, the quiet but solid spine of the story was a woman writer just doing her work, finding her voice despite him, and persisting despite limited support.

 

A film from this year's MSPIFF that really stood out from a strong field was Sami Blood (Sameblod), a film about Sweden's treatment of the Sami people set in the 1930s, the debut film by Sami writer/director Amanda Kernel. I was curious how the film would affect the mostly Swedish-American audience. The festival often plays broad comedies as their Swedish films. The great acting and the heartbreaking, intimate story of a defiant young woman full of thwarted desires seemed to move everyone.

Another great movie was Signature Move, by writer/director Jennifer Reeder, I think also her debut.  This was in English, Urdu, and Spanish, a fun lesbian romance centered around semiprofessional wrestling. There was a pretty thick layer of familiar cheese around the cross-cultural misunderstandings and mother-daughter conflict, but it worked.

 

A winning documentary was Chavela, by Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyl, about singer Chavela Vargas. I had not known that she was originally from Costa Rica, and knew her mainly as one of Frida Kahlo's more dramatic lovers.  She was popular first in Mexico, but alcohol took its toll.  The film spends a long time on her later life and the Spanish revival of her career. It is worth seeing for the music alone.

Some other things that lightened 2017 a little were the ever stranger but delicious forms of vegan cheese my girlfriend learned to make. I also read a lot of vegan cookbooks, to keep up.  The most original and least repetitive were Street Vegan: Recipes and Dispatches from The Cinnamon Snail Food Truck, by Adam Sobel, and But I Could Never Go Vegan! by Kristy Turner.  The spicy sandwiches in the Street Vegan and the cheeses in the Turner book are winners.

Catherine Lundoff did me a big favor by making me get off my duff on a work night to go see Cleve Jones speak at the Quatrefoil Library. It was in the middle of a long week spent thinking about and working virtually in Puerto Rico, but he was engaging and inspiring. He answered questions about his book When We Rise.  He covered a lot of ground, including being a gay teen in Indiana, running off to San Francisco, working with Harvey Milk, the Quilt Project, and his ongoing union organizing.  The admonitions that every victory is temporary, it can be done, and keep fighting are still ringing in my ears.

The French film Beats Per Minute ( 120 battements par minute), directed by Robin Campillo, was a good look at a non-New York ACT UP.  It reminded me a lot of ACT UP Boston and San Francisco and conveyed the sense of urgency, improvisation, and found community I remember. It took time to get into the arguments about tactics and the ethics and effectiveness of insider strategies that various documentaries have also explored.

Another book about organizing and community that I spent a lot of time thinking about after reading it was Sarah Schulman's latest nonfiction book Conflict Is Not Abuse.  She builds on her prior nonfiction writing and draws on her experience in a range of social movements to discuss effective and destructive strategies for ending abusive behavior without relying on police and the legal and penal systems. It's not the first discussion of these issues, but she draws on her unique points of insight and personal experience.

I read that after a very different discussion of recent social movement praxis and ethics, Jonathan Smuckers' Hegemony How-To: A Handbook for Radicals. Neither of these books said things that were news to me, after years in the same and similar groups and observing what has worked and backfired for others. But I liked how they were both rigorous and forthright in examining mistakes and detrimental assumptions the groups they were in had made.

I picked up Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera (Riverdale Ave Books) because of the cover art by Kristy Road and the catchy blurb. It turned out to be a fun and thoughtful story about a young woman from the Bronx going to Portland, OR, for a summer internship with a new-agey white woman who inspired her with a body positive manifesto.  She wrestles with the contradictions in various mentors' personal political theories and the differences in their actions, forging her own way and pursuing a sweet, sexy romance.

Carmen Maria Machado's collection, Her Body and Other Parties is the kind of short story collection you want to hate because everyone says it is a must-read to the point it seems overhyped, but then you read it and can't avoid doing the same thing.

Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon, a local author, is a Minnesota mystery in a familiar vein but explores the protagonist's experiences in the foster care system and the legacy of Minnesota's removal of native children from their parents.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe's latest novel, A Thin Bright Line, fictionalizes and extrapolates from what she learned about her aunt, who died in a fire. The protagonist lucks into a job working for a visionary scientist who is extracting the first-ever polar ice cores and explores various lesbian communities of the Cold War era.

Finally, I appreciated the detailed history of how various public lands and national parks came to be found in the 2005 memoir of Mike McCloskey, In the Thick of It: My Life in the Sierra Club.  As a young lawyer, he became the first field organizer of the Sierra Club, in the days before the Club became a direct mail behemoth. It was a timely read, as much of this legacy is under threat of dismantling, road building, toxic resource extraction, and other destructive uses. I also learned some new inside dirt on my uncle's longstanding environmental movement gripes and antipathies.  

As my uncle would say, the challenge is to Think Like a Mountain. But also, to win when necessary.  Here's to 2018.

Carrie Devall writes from Minneapolis, MN, where it rains a lot thanks to global warming.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2016, pt. 13: Carrie Devall

Pleasures of 2016
by Carrie Devall

It’s difficult to remember anything that happened before the fall of 2016, at this particular moment. Looking at my notebooks, I see that I did a lot of reading of odd books as research. I revisited a lot of forgotten feminist academic theory from the 1990s. I also spent a lot of my free time trying to improve my half-forgotten French, self-taught and rusty Spanish, and ever-beginner Russian and Finnish language skills. I did a lot of reading of crappy popular books translated into Spanish from the English, because, sadly, this is much easier than reading literary works in the original. Most of this year’s reading left me with little to recommend to others who don’t share obscure interests.

However, I did manage to read some standout new science fiction. In January, as soon as they came out, I grabbed copies of Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun, translated from the Finnish to English by Lola Rogers, and Charlie Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky. The Core of the Sun is a sly exploration of the social construction of gender set in a near future where capsaicin is a controlled substance, with a least a nod to H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It’s the kind of book that makes me feel I need to reread it immediately to get deeper into the layers, if there was only time. All the Birds in the Sky is a grander apocalyptic story with a central romance and more geeky goodness. It was a faster read but also provided a lot of food for thought after reading.

I followed that with the latest Cass Neary novel from Elizabeth Hand, Hard Light. I am addicted to this series for the hard-bitten heroine and the focus on the science and art of photography. Her dark fantasy novel Wylding Hall was interesting for its focus on how people make music and what it can do to them. I did not read it compulsively like I did the other book, but it contained some visual-mental images of the terrible that were quite powerful.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor was the perfect fast-paced read full of layers of story right when I needed this kind of story: alien communication, a spooky mystery, cultural differences playing into and foiling expectations.

Infomocracy by Malka Older is incredibly timely as well as a fascinating exploration of how political processes work under the surface, and how it could all be differently envisioned. It’s hard to glibly sum up, except to say that this book is incredibly timely and seems to me to be very necessary to the conversation that is science fiction at this moment. I read The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson not long before Infomocracy came out. It was also a near future story focused on the social organization of political systems, but it began to seem flat or forced by the time I got to the end. Infomocracy pushed further and continued to feel fresh.

The other books I remember very strongly were two novels from Louise Erdrich, The Round House and The Plague of Doves. I read a lot of books about tribal court jurisdiction as a student and young lawyer, but The Round House puts all those books to shame with one family’s devastating story and some brilliant imagery.

 I also have a very solid memory of going to see Carol the day of its theatrical release in Minneapolis, on Christmas Eve of 2015. Enjoying a very good film made by a filmmaker I adore in a room full of lesbians old enough to remember the era the film was set in, or at least the silencing and invisibility of the 1980s, was definitely the highlight of the turn to the New Year. I saw Carol several more times in 2016, and reread the Patricia Highsmith novel it was based on. 2016’s unraveling has only made it more timely, a film that thinks about how women who love women find ways to live in a world created and maintained by people who cannot even contemplate this as a possibility. I may view it again before the year ends.

The Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival has also been a steady highlight of my year’s movie viewing for quite a few years now. I saw a lot of films this year from French Canada, thanks to sponsorship of the festival this year from the Minneapolis-based Canadian consul and from Quebec. The best of these was My Internship in Canada, a feature about a young Haitian man who turns his internship in Canadian regional government into a chance to wield a lot more influence than anyone expected. The movie has some issues, partly because its one of those movies where everyone is the butt of many jokes but this plays out unevenly because of larger histories. However, it weaves commentary of the current state of national and global politics, electoral strategy, family drama, and commentary about post-colonialism in and outside of Canada into an engaging story that moves rapidly and remains surprising.

The best film of the festival for me was The Fencer, a film set in Estonia during the period of incorporation within the USSR after the German and then Russian occupations of the Second World War. The film was made jointly by Estonia, Finland, and Germany and became Finland’s entry to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film speaks loudly about authoritarianism and bullying with a small, relatively quiet story about a few human beings trying to retain their humanity in a situation that leaves little room for individual choice. Too bad that’s not relevant to today’s world, huh. I managed to catch many of the Spanish language films that had been in the festival later in the year, when we took a trip to Spain. The strongest ones were Viva, an Irish film set in Cuba. The trailer made this seem like it was probably a retread of a lot of old queer movies, about a young drag performer struggling with issues of identity and family. However, the story was strongly character-driven and more moving than I expected.

Magellanes, set in Lima, was difficult to watch but kept me thinking long afterwards. It was an ambitious attempt to push the commercial motion picture format deep into questions about masculinity and complicity with authoritarianism, and its intimate partner genocide.

An older and much less heavy movie from Spain that explored masculinity in interesting ways is Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed, about a teacher’s road trip to try and meet John Lennon. The Girl King, from Sweden, was not as deeply flawed as I had feared, and was an interesting enough take on the life of Queen Christina with a few great scenes. The Clouds of Sils Maria is also worth mentioning, for Kristin Stewart’s performance and stunning outdoor scenery.

Last but not least, the restored print of Daughters of the Dust the 1991 indie film written, directed, and produced by Julie Dash, was even better than I remembered. The storyline is ostensibly about a Gullah family reuniting circa 1900 before many members head north to try and make a new life, but the movie is much more than the sum of the amazing visuals, music, acting, and story. I highly recommend it as something to see when trying to find the needed courage to face 2017.


Carrie Devall writes from Minneapolis, MN, where it rains a lot thanks to global warming.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening, pt. 13: Carrie Devall

Pleasures of 2015 
by Carrie Devall

I spent a lot of time this year learning basic Russian and Finnish, and reading cheesy horror and thrillers in Spanish and French to work on vocabulary and fluency. Not very exciting, eh? However, I have to recommend the FinnishPod101 videos on YouTube if you want to learn a few basic phrases before heading to Helsinki in 2017. They are well made, easy to follow, and let you see and hear the words at the same time.

Reading in English, I ended up focusing on Finnish, Estonian, and Scandinavian fiction in translation. Most of the Scandinavian fiction in the Hennepin County library system leans toward the more violent and callous end of crime/noir. Leena Leihtolainen’s The Bodyguard was the standout here because it did not glorify violence, had a female heroine who was extremely self-reliant but mostly plausible, and dipped into Finnish politics a bit. The lynx theme did not hurt, either.

The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna is a 1981 novel that got some mixed reviews because it was translated into English from a French translation. I found it to be funny, touching and thought-provoking. It’s a picaresque novel and social satire with a deceptively simple style that reads a lot like many novels based on fairy tales. It also has some fantastical twists. The Howling Miller makes fun of the stoic self-reliant ethic and hypocritical romance of wilderness that characterizes both Finnish and upper Midwestern U.S. culture, as well as inhumane bureaucracies and the stifling aspect of small communities.

The Blue Fox, by Icelandic writer Sjón, is a very short novel about hunting in winter but has a poetic style and, again, some nice fantastical twists. I started but have not finished the Icelandic science fiction novel LoveStar, by Andri Snær Magnason, but the opening chapters were snazzy, funny, and full of wacky world building. A corporate tech god has unlocked the key to transmitting data via birdwaves, hence the wackiness.

The two novels I read this year that have stayed with me the most were both by Sofi Oksanen, a Finnish-Estonian writer living in Finland. She also made some strong, brave speeches and interviews in 2015 about the Putin regime historical revisionism that her fiction also works against. The two novels I read covered a lot of territory, moving between the periods of successive Russian and German occupations of Estonia and more current eras through stories of families from rural villages.

The older novel, Purge, deals with the Russian sex trade in the present and the many forms of sexual as well as economic exploitation during the occupations. The more recent novel, When the Doves Disappeared, similarly focuses on the things people do to survive the occupations and the long-term effects on their families, their communities, and their selves. In Doves, this includes writing revisionist literature. These are obviously not fluffy books, but I found them incredibly well written and leavened with deep compassion and understanding.

The excellent translator for both Oksanen novels, Seattleite Lola Rogers, also translated the Lehtolainen novel, Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer, and Johanna Sinisalo’s The Blood of Angels, so she is 5 for 5 in making my year-end lists.

Back to the speculative, Mati Unt is seen as one of the most influential modernist and then post-modernist writers in Estonia, and he wrote about werewolves, outer space, electricity, and vampires. Many of his postmodern books were conglomerates of snippets from various sources juxtaposed against one another, as Johanna Sinisalo has done in many of her novels. I read Unt’s Diary of a Blood Donor, which was clever and witty but gave me the feeling I was missing a lot. Doing a little more research, apparently Unt was somewhat blasphemously homaging Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), who is seen as the first female Estonian poet and the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence, in a Gothic vampire novel. This goes on my research and reread list.

The movie that sent me in pursuit of Estonian literature was the funny 2010 documentary “Disco and Atomic War,” by Jaak Kilmi, which focused on the influence of Finnish TV, Dallas and disco on Estonian culture during the 80s. The documentary visually depicts how Estonians watched Finnish TV en masse from behind the Iron Curtain with illegally modified TV sets. This began to unravel Soviet ideological control despite attempts to block the broadcasts and create state-approved disco shows.

The Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) had a good catalog this year. I got to see the Lithuanian lesbian movie Sangailės vasara (The Summer of Sangailė), which had good production quality, great acting, and an okay story. Chagall/ Malevich was a fascinating look at Marc Chagall’s early life, his amazing wife, and the different artistic paths taken by Chagall, the Jewish dreamer trying to float above anti-Semitic, Soviet-controlled Byelorussia, and his opposite, Kazimir Malevich, the father of Suprematism (the artistic movement reflected in many of those old Soviet propaganda posters.) The Russian Woodpecker is a quirky and deeply disturbing documentary about the Chernobyl disaster and the role that U.S.-Soviet jockeying for military supremacy may have played in triggering the blast.

We got the last tickets to the Finnish movie, Mielensäpahoittaja (The Grump), by Dome Karukoski. It was sold out for good reason. An elderly stoic and “self-reliant” farmer coming to visit his citified children in Helsinki and the ensuing culture clash is as Minnesotan a story as it is Finnish. The movie was very tight, well paced and full of visual contrasts and deadpan acting that made the over-the-top actions funnier.

Bande de Filles (Girlhood) by Céline Sciamma, is focused on teenaged French girls in a banlieue/suburb outside Paris struggling to find their way through the obstacle course created by racism, sexism, and ties to family and tradition. It was similarly well constructed, focused on the characters and their personality quirks, and funny and moving in turns. Good music and visual style also made the package work. It is now available on Netflix, as is my last year’s teen girl movie pick, We Are the Best.

Stanley Nelson’s documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution contained an immense amount of video footage collected from all over the world showing the day-to-day interactions of members as well as the public actions. It underscored how women were integral to the organizing as well as all the well-known male leaders.

I also found the Pussy Riot documentary, available on Netflix, quite interesting, even after having read Masha Gessen’s lengthy book about the Russian feminist activist performance art group/punk band. The documentary includes footage of their court trial, some of their performances, and interviews with people ranging from family members to the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In terms of nonfiction, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism, Duke U. Press, 2007, by Finn Enke (book published under Anne Enke), asks interesting questions about how histories of the women’s movement are constructed and how participation is characterized to define social movements as exclusive rather than broad and diverse. This book documents the participation of a wide variety of women in community organizations such as battered women’s shelters and softball leagues in the Midwest to explore these questions, with a focus on women’s contestation of public spaces.

I spent some time rereading Barbara Deming’s writings about her participation in the Civil Rights and peace movements in the 50s and 60s and the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment in the 80s, particularly Prisons That Cannot Hold. She is a powerful theorist of non-violence from a non-religious basis. I was directly influenced by her ideas through SWPC members I did direct action with in the 80s, and it was interesting to read her work more thoroughly 25 years later.

This was accompanied by A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, the 2011 dual biography from Martin Duberman. I have really enjoyed Duberman’s recent double biographies of queer activities and/or artists. Deming and McReynolds were both involved in the peace movement, the Civil Rights movement, and early gay activism, but in very different ways and with a crucial difference being Deming’s trajectory towards lesbian feminist peace activism.A Saving Remnant is a little more draggy than the double biography I read last year, about Essex Hemphill and Michael Callen. However, it relates in detail some crucial pieces of movement histories, such as the internal debates and the coalition work by particular individuals, which are otherwise quickly becoming lost to time and the ever-expanding internets.

Last but not at all least, I just finished The Fortunate Fall, by Rafael Carter, a very complicated (post-) cyberpunk novel from the late 1990s, which I somehow never got around to reading before, despite queer cyberpunk. Yes, I am slapping my head, hard, though only virtually. So many things come together in this novel, with a critique of pretty much everything you can think of that fits in 21st century science fiction sandwiched in between plot points but also a wicked sense of humor. It still packs a very strong punch. Its future Russia is all too plausible, not the easiest feat of prognostication in the late 1990s. I join the long line of people asking, Why is this book not in print?

Carrie Devall writes from Minneapolis, MN, where it rains a lot thanks to global warming.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening, pt. 12: Carrie Devall

The Pleasures of 2014 
by Carrie Devall

One of the biggest pleasures for me in 2014 has been a two-year-old Border Collie/Siberian Husky mix named Betty. The MN Border Collie Rescue saved her from an animal hoarding situation, and she was terrified of people, even after being with her foster hosts for almost a year. However, a ton of treats and a pack and comfort dog of her own have let her sneaky, goofy, bit-of-a-princess personality blossom. I spent a lot of time this year about the gross mistreatment of dogs and about their resilience on animal rescue sites. I'm realizing in retrospect that a lot of the books I read this year also focused on animal and human behavior, and in particular animal violence and human cruelty, or “inhumane treatment,” as they say.

I saw a bunch of international films at the the MSP International Film Festival, though not half as many as I wish I could have seen, looking through the catalog again. The best these were about harsh landscapes and human cruelty towards other humans and animals, except for one. Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border was a very personal film by Rodrigo Reyes, who came to speak at the showing. I though he ably showed some of the stark contradictions in life at the U.S.-Mexico border, where I once worked for legal aid, though some audience members did not like the part that showed the mistreatment of stray dogs to raise questions about treatment of humans.

Harmony Lessons was an engrossing movie from a young Kazakh director that used graphic images and a pattern of violence among high school boys in a metafictional discussion of torture, power, and control, I assume alluding to both the Kazakh and Russian governments. The documentary Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus followed a troupe of actors as they fought against repression while the dictator staged his re-election. This was another very well-made film where the graphic violence was not at all gratuitous.

On the flip side, We Are The Best was a fun and easygoing film about Swedish girls in the early 1980s Death to Prom was a locally-made film with a multiracial cast that I remember being very funny and charming though the actual plot has escaped me beyond the guy and girl who are artists and best friends competing for the hot new Russian boy at their high school. Belle falls more into the serious side as it was based loosely on a true story and explored the legal status of freed slaves in the eighteenth century through the vehicle of a costume drama.

who fought everyday sexism with punk rock, by Lucas Moodysson. It was refreshing to see a film that focused on girls without being difficult to watch or stupid, and the music and 80s hair is great. (Check out the trailer.)

I just finished Karen Joy Fowler's book from 2013, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which I found to be very gripping and insightful, my two go-to words to describe books I read from cover to cover in less than a day or two. It's hard to have too much to say about this book without giving away spoilers, because so much of the style of the book has to do with surprises, revisions, and questions about memory. I also say “insightful” with a caveat: that sharp insight into human character and behavior and our treatment of animals, and into family dynamics, can be deeply disturbing.

Another novel that dealt with disturbing questions in a deceptively 'easy' style and is difficult to put into an elevator pitch was Tehran in Twilight by Salar Abdoh, a noirish novel of political intrigue set in New York and Tehran. Often reading like cynical poetry, this novel has a meditative pace but covers an immense amount of internal and external territory in amazingly few words.

I also just read the book I'd been waiting all year for, which got rave reviews outside the US and then was delayed in being released here. For the record, wikipedia would tell you that Johanna Sinisalo is a Finnish writer who has won Nebula and Tiptree awards, respectively, for English translations of the short story "Baby Doll" and novel Troll: A Love Story (U.S. translation)/Not Before Sunset (U.K. translation), as well as the Finlandia prize for Troll in the original.

While waiting for her new novel, I reread her available fiction and the Daedalus anthology of Finnish Fantasy translated into English that she edited. That contains many intriguing stories, including a rollicking tale about a wily dog demon. I'm always surprised how few fans of feminist SFF seem to have read her work, because I can't stop rereading regularly for the pleasures of finding the deeper layers and more subtle nuances. I am hoping folks will work to make Worldcon go to Helskini in 2017(!) so the work of Sinisalo and other great Finnish writers will get more play. (See Cheeky Monkey Press, also.)

While Troll focused on Finnish characters and folklore, Birdbrain decentered Finland. The protagonists, a newly-coupled young Finnish man and woman, go on a trek through relatively “untouched” wilderness in Australia and Tasmania. Birdbrain explores, among many related themes and conflicts, the relationships of humans to animals and of Westerners and Europeans to the globe as a living entity and its many other peoples, also in amazingly few words.

Ostensibly moving back to Finland as the setting, Enkelten Verta, translated as The Blood of Angels, sets its gunsights on the dirty secrets and grimy underbelly of BigAg as well as the contradictions inherent in animal rights activism against it. Sinisalo uses blog entries as the lifeline that links the greater world, the “real world,” to the protagonist, a bee farmer in rural Finland who steps into and out of present reality/spacetime that is linked to the massive die-offs and disappearances of bees. The novel's action takes place in that kind of ethereal near-future-yet-already-here timeline that William Gibson has set up in his recent novels, taking that one small step from events happening now IRL (bee colony collapse) to the possible logical outcomes that may already be underway as we read and share the book.

The end result is a terse but lyrical hybrid of science fiction and fantasy similar to the other two nooks, here weaving speculation in with the characters' highly politicized opinions about the underlying causes of the bee colony collapse syndrome. Angels hides its feminist hand a lot more than the earlier two novels. However, for starters, the fact that the women of this world are so obviously missing from the web of relationships that connect the characters is a statement in itself.

The same translator, Lola Rodgers, translated another book I enjoyed this year, a science fictional noir novel with similar themes and setting in a near-future Finland in the midst of global environmental collapse. After working on learning Finnish through Teach Yourself books, I can say pretty assuredly that the challenges of translating the subtleties of Sinisalo's wordplay and so-dry-you-might-miss-them witticisms between languages as different as Finnish and English have got to be daunting. It also seems like misplaced energy to try and render judgment about a particular translation of Sinisalo when she reads so well across translations. I could say that Rodgers' translations seemed particularly smooth and skillful, but that would only really be saying that I found both books very readable.

In Antti Tuomainen's The Healer, a poet searches for his wife, a journalist who has gone missing while researching a story about a serial killer. The pacing of the unraveling of the mysteries of the wife's disappearance and the role of the serial killer was pretty brisk. Hamid, a recent North African immigrant who drives a cab, assists him for a complex mix of reasons. I had trouble deciding whether this was simply another Magical Negro role or at least a partial escape from that trap, but it seems to represent a small step forward for the prominent books in the “Scandinoir” framework. The generous handful of Scandinavian crime/noir novels I read over the last year discussed race and immigration mostly by having gangster and skinhead characters commit racial assaults as a showy backdrop to the anti-hero's battle against criminal masterminds. It was interesting to see a Finnish book, out of the few marketed to an English speaking audience, that tried to grapple with race in present-day Finland. Sinisalo's books have some characters rant about the history of global slavery and exploitation but do not really attempt that task.

I've really enjoyed the Skiffy and Fanty podcast series on World SFF, too, for the wide variety of people and con panels and in-depth discussions.

Away from SSF, Pissing In a River was the long-awaited follow-up for Lorrie Sprecher, who wrote Sister Safety Pin, another novel about dykes who love punk rock and get involved in AIDS activism in the 1980s. Both novels center on women who are navigating relationships with each other while dealing the impact of male violence against them in the recent past. I thought Pissing In a River had a more complex and emotionally moving storyline, but I like that both books deal with sexual assault (and PIR with OCD) as something the characters are dealing with in their busy and complicated lives instead of a gratuitous plot device.

Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger, by Kelly Cogswell, pretty much explains its premise in

the title. This book got hella things right in terms of describing the in-fighting and ridiculousness of direct action affinity group activism in the most loving and nostalgic possible terms. It also also names bad choices, racism, and internalized homophobia for what they were in the moment and the movements of the time. This book is not just a list of the cool things a bunch of activists did or a recounting of how they did it, but also a parsing of what worked and what did not and why choices that proved detrimental to the overall project and individual actions were made. Cogswell was in an interesting position in terms of viewing and intervening in the racial dynamics of the NYC Avengers, and she also explores the challenges she and her Cuban partner faced in their relationship and with the Avengers.

I found Sarah Waters' new novel, The Paying Guests, to be one of her strongest yet, along with Affinity and The Night Watch. I am generally not a big fan of historical novels with rich period detail, but this is reliably the aspect of her novels which draws me into her stories. This one truly is ripped straight out of a tabloid headline, about a murder trial. It's not simply a bodice ripper and neither a murder mystery, but a little of both.

I read a lot of biographies of queer activists and artists focused on a certain era, the 1970s to early 1990s. Among the ones I liked the best were Just Kids, Patti Smith's book about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, because it touched on both the punk music and fine art scenes of the time and really got into both the spiritual aspects of the creative process, the business aspects of these arts, and the gritty realities of life as an artist. Cynthia Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly, was an eye opener for me because I had read his books but not seen his art, and the biography has great color plates of many of his paintings and photos. In a nutshell, both men died from complications associated with AIDS and were fierce fighters against right wing attacks on their art and arts funding for similarly challenging work, the not-coincidentally recurrent theme in queer artist/writer biographies from this era. I also finally saw The Dallas Buyer's Club, which had a lot of flaws but ultimately did a decent job of viscerally depicting the root of the raw fury that fueled AIDS activism before the cocktail.

Martin Duberman's biography of Essex Hemphill and Michael Callen, Hold Tight Gently, mines similar territory. Essex Hemphill was an African American poet from Washington, D.C., who founded, co-founded, and helped nurture a wide array of organizations and literary magazines, readings, etc. His life became closely intertwined with that of Joseph Beam, who edited the groundbreaking anthology In The Life, and they co-edited Brother to Brother. Michael Callen was a white singer and AIDS activist who bucked the gay and both the AIDS activism and industry establishments with a no-b.s. approach towards the scientific data available about longterm survival with HIV. All three men were heroes to me as a baby dyke. Duberman's biography delves deeply into the history of seemingly everyone and everything both subjects were involved in as well as their own personal histories, with all their human contradictions. Like Cogswell, he covers in detail many of the controversies and conflicts that came up in the artistic and activist organizations and movements they were involved in, making this a history of an era as much as a split biography.

Christopher Bram's biography of a generation (or three) of gay writers, Eminent Outlaws, was also a good read. While it is hard not to think of it as the story of the white gay canon plus James Baldwin, I found that I knew less about that canon than I thought, despite having read many of the novels and stories they wrote and a lot about their personal histories in the course of following gay lit over many decades. Bram provides concise yet detailed intertwined biographies of writers but also focuses on the larger social forces they faced, particularly publishing industry homophobia.

On a completely different note, I was surprised to enjoy Stephen King's sequel to The Shining as much as I did. The antagonists in Doctor Sleep were truly creepy, though not at all like the Overlook Hotel. This is one I would not recommend to people who are squeamish or reactive to repeated musings about child abuse or cravings for alcohol, but it makes a right proper horror story out of these longtime King themes without being a retread.

Carrie Devall lives in Minneapolis and has been told so many times that she spends too much time working and not enough time writing that it just might be true.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.15: Carrie Devall

Pleasures of 2013

by Carrie Devall

 

2013 was the first year that I spent a lot more time listening to fiction and people talking about fiction than reading fiction on the page.  I read ebooks on my phone during the commute and listened to podcasts and audiobooks during runs and workouts, with only a small amount of time to read paper books.  This changed my tastes somewhat.  I also listened to many books I would not have read, due to the limited availability of books in audio formats.

 

One highlight of this year’s listening was Richard Bowes’ story “The Queen and the Cambion.”  I first read this in his Aqueduct story collection, The Queen, The Cambion, and Seven Others ebook, and it was good.  However, Wilson Fowlie’s podcast reading of this story (PodCastle # 257) added a whole other layer, fleshing out the characters, Queen Victoria and Merlin, and making the prose pop.   I was also very happy to get to purchase two new Rick Bowes books in the same year, as Dust Devil on a Quiet Street came out through Lethe Press.

 

I was also pleased to find out that a story I had recommended to many people but that was only available (as far as I knew) in old paper copies of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Charlie Jane Anders’ “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” had been reprinted in Lightspeed in audio format.  This story not only explores the possibilities for gendered bodies in a thought-provoking manner, it does so with class and/or caste as a primary feature of gender.  I was glad to see that it had not aged at all and was still as provocative, and now is easily accessed.

 

On a non-SFF tangent, I was surprised to enjoy the audiobook for Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life, as much as I did.  This audiobook is greatly enhanced by being read alternately by Keef himself, his pal Johnny Depp, and John Hurley.  At times, Richards recounts stories from growing up in Dartford in the aftermath of WWII, the formation of the Rolling Stones, their initial obsessive search for blues authenticity, the perils of touring in America, and partying with the long list of names you would expect.  He makes insightful comments about the personalities and the dynamics that were playing out between them that makes this a lot more than an exercise in name-dropping.  At other times, he gets into deep discussions of the structure of blues music, the technical things he and other players did to get the rich and unique sounds they are known for, and the vagaries of the music business.  The biggest surprise was that he addresses Stones-style sexism and racial appropriation, not quite head-on and by no means ‘perfectly’ but more than once and with more sensitivity than I expected.

 

I’m currently reading Ruth Long’s The Treachery of Beautiful Things, a YA take on becoming lost in fairyland that is very creepy.  I started the year reading Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, which takes a more cerebral and convoluted route through the same territory, focused on questions of what is real and what is not and just who can make that distinction with any authority.  His take on similar source material was also a compelling read.

 

I read and watched a lot of horror this year, and the best of the lot had to be Carrie, the 2013 remake.  Obviously, I’m biased towards the title, and I love the Stephen King book.  I’m also a big fan of Kimberly Pierce, the director of Carrie, based on her prior movies Boys Don’t Cry and Stop Loss.  She brings the same kind of layering and focus on what is behind the violence to Carrie, and weaves together timeless and new forms of bullying in interesting ways.  She makes it clear that she is bucking the teen horror movie trend of having the girl from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ be the menacing evil, such as in The Craft.  She also draws the horror even more directly than King did from the clash between fundamentalist phobia of sex and eroticism with teenage coming into being and the body, adding a modern flavor with social media and allusions to the recent wave of school shootings.  Julianne Moore, as Carrie’s mother, as well as Chloe Grace Moretz as Carrie White do an amazing job of making that work without crossing into caricature.

 

The most unusual movie I saw I 2013 was Strange Frame, an animated musical scifi lesbian adventure movie.  I was hesitant about expecting too much after seeing trailers.  On the one hand, it was focused on lesbians of color, the music sounded great, the animation was very stylish and well-produced, and Tim Curry, Karen Black, Alan Tudyck, and George Takei are among the voice actors.  On the other hand, a dude made it, like the celebrated “lesbian” movie of the year Blue is the Warmest Color.  But the narrative is very engaging.  The music and animation are lush and enhance the story, which succeeds pretty well as a scifi film and as a love story.  While I wish lesbians in movies that try to sell to a wider audience did not always have to display their bodies to men in a monetized context in order for the movies to be deemed ‘sexy’ enough for prime time, this is used in a hearty critique of the entertainment industry and the animated heroines are not one-dimensional.

 

The book I have been reading for the longest period of time in 2013, which is a testament to its thriller pacing and captivating little details, is Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I am only two thirds of the way through its 1,000-plus pages, and I’ve been reading it in between finishing other books just for the sake of finishing a complete narrative, but it has remained a page turner that I can’t put down for long.  The plot is somewhat far-fetched and not all that different from the other cyberpunk thrillers I’ve read, but the wide-ranging characters really got under my skin and made me want to know what happens next, in the “real world” and the cyberworld of the MMORPG run by one of the main characters.  It also makes me laugh out loud a lot on public transportation, and then have to look furtively around to make sure no one noticed. 

 

A similarly far-fetched and funny novel I devoured in short order was Rule 43 by Charles Stross, a quicksilver story about cybercops, a serial killer, and a family guy just trying to get their lives together after being released from prison for cybercrimes.   An added bonus is the fact that none of the characters are very “straight,” which at times is a little stilted but overall rings true and adds that much more room for plot-complicating entanglements.  Another thriller that never stopped moving was Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising, which I happened to read just as Greenpeace activists were being arrested by Russia in the Arctic.  I also whipped through all of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s crime thrillers about an Icelandic lawyer who solves gory murders with supernatural or occult themes while raising her two teenagers.

 

The funniest book about science I read in 2013, though not science fiction, was Lake Overturn by Vestal MacIntyre.  Slightly more subtle than Carrie (and Footloose), this book uses the clash between fundamentalism and a science fair to tell engaging stories of a variety of gay and straight people in a town that is too small for their lives. 

 

Somehow, this reminds me of a very quiet book that was at the same time a very powerful exploration of what it takes to live as an artist or writer, Fair Play by Tove Jansson, of Moomintroll fame.  Her other novels that I read this year, The True Deceivers and The Summer Book, were also very good, but Fair Play was incredibly subtle and intricate, using very few words to great effect.

 

Carrie Devall writes obfuscating legalese and science fiction from Minneapolis, MN, when not running or skiing.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2012, pt.8: Carrie Devall

Pleasures of 2012 
by Carrie Devall

Looking back, I realize that I spent much of 2012 reading novels and biographies and viewing films and museum exhibits that were all focused on the 1980s, thanks to a series of retrospectives and reissues.

Among the best of these was the biography of Vito Russo, Celluloid Activist by Michael Schiavi. (A biographical film, Vito, has also come out recently with good reviews.) Celluloid Activist nicely balances Vito Russo's personal and family history with the political-social backdrops of his work as a film critic and archivist, which culminated in The Celluloid Closet, and his work as an activist, including his involvement in the Stonewall riots, gay liberation including the GAA, early AIDS treatment activism, and his key role in ACT UP! Vito's ongoing ties to his Catholic family and his friendships with women, including radical lesbian feminist activists and celebrities such as Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin throughout these eras particularly fascinating.

The AIDS activism documentary How To Survive a Plague by David France was less nuanced, as it focused on the political stance and victories of treatment activists, one subset of both ACT UP! and other AIDS activist and service organizations. It also disparages the other points of view that arose within the group, i.e. those of leftists and feminists, making it seem as if only sectarians and provocateurs who were not themselves people living with AIDS disagreed with the men and handful of women who split off to form the Treatment Activist Group. Nonetheless, the footage obtained by David France from many individuals who recorded demonstrations and meetings with video and film cameras makes this material very personal, direct, and “in your face.” Peter Staley taking charge of a crossfire TV interview with Patrick Buchanan is not to be missed.

A novel that particularly captivated me was Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson. Straight edge punk kids collide with hippie parents in the late 80s, the inherent homophobia and homoeroticism of straight edge hardcore is not side-stepped, and the prose is rich. Another that had some great observations, often couched in deadpan dialogue, about the particular character of the prevailing conservatism in the 1980s, was The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. This novel's investigation of class, race, and sexuality takes full advantage of the reader's knowledge of the AIDS epidemic that emerges by the end of the book, yet leaves room for coded, shifting readings of the narrator's seemingly forthright telling of his coming of age story.

A novel with a 70s-80s punk aesthetic that I really enjoyed was Elizabeth Hand's Available Dark, the sequel to Generation Loss. This mystery series delves deeply into matters like sexual serial killing and voyeuristic collecting without being exploitative or trite, akin to Laurie King's earlier novels. Hand's young adult novel, Radiant Days, was also particularly interesting to me, as she merged Arthur Rimbaud with my hometown Washington, D.C.'s graffiti writing history from the 70s and 80s as well as the better-known NY scene and Basquiat. My only beef was that Disco Dan and D.C.'s go-go writers deserved a little more credit for their early and unique influence on the generations to come, but that's the usual NYC/D.C. complaint that will never be properly heard outside the 202.

I read the whole Minnesota Supernatural series by Thomas Disch (The Sub, The M.D., The Businessman, and The Priest) and was not disappointed. The novels are truly horror tales because of their accurate depiction of this region's classed and raced eccentricities, complicated by the inherent ridiculousness of gender as social construction, and his piercing eye for religious literalism's weak spots. These stories revel in the grotesque and over the top in almost every possible way, yet ring so true in the finer sense.

A few other cool things I saw: Aelita, Queen of Mars, the 1924 Soviet film, likely the first Russian science fiction film, at the Walker Arts Center to awe-inspiring accompaniment by an organist and Theramin player. Striking visuals, visible strains between revolutionary zeal and the reality of bureaucratic takeover, and amazing footage of Moscow in the 1920s. Very few copies exist but the film is available on youtube in its entirety, I believe.

Two movies that provided a stark contrast to 80s repression and ignorance were the Icelandic gay teen coming out film Jitters, and Romeos, a German young adult film focused on FTM transitioning and gay romance. Both provide happy endings that could not have occurred twenty years before in the same way. Young adult novel Finding Emily by Rachel Gold also fits in this category, mixing Worlds of Warcraft with a coming-out-as-female story that does not rely on stereotypes to depict Emily's struggle with parents who are not immediately accepting.

Also worth watching is the 1981 two-part Soviet science fiction film To the Stars by Hard Ways (Cherez ternii k zvyozdam), an enigmatic environmentalism parable that inspired a women's hairdo craze that was very scifi. Nightwatch/Nochnii Dozor was a very watchable Russian vampire horror (not romance) film. Rereading Stephen King's Salem's Lot was a welcome return to the days when vampires were horrible and unredeemable, and so scary.

And Immanuel Wallerstein's After Liberalism and Historical Capitalism provided rejoinders to all the truisms we can so easily soak up from popular culture and mainstream news about economic history that is just dead wrong. It's a good reminder to rethink, question, and rethink again. Peter Edelman's So Rich, So Poor was a good summary of his work to date, loads of statistics and case studies on economic policy and the possibilities as yet unexplored in any lasting, substantive, and comprehensive way for making good on all that talk of equalizing outcomes.

Cory Doctorow's less-hyped young adult novel For The Win is a good compliment to these books, a rocking science fiction adventure with all the “As you know, Bob” moments focused on economic theory and the effects of globalization instead of physics or rocket science. It has its flaws, economically and socially and in terms of replicating the male gaze without full problematization, but nonetheless delivers a diverse cast of characters, some strong but believable females, and a plausible dystopic future from a gamer's perspective.

Last but not least, Judith (now J. Jack) Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure is a fascinating dive into the gender theory of SpongeBob, “Dude, Where's My Car,” and “Finding Nemo.” Gaga Feminism takes this further. Though I found it to be a somewhat repetitive and “lite” version of The Queer Art of Failure, it has some fun re-reading music videos and questions the solidity and ultimate value of the current focus on gay marriage in useful ways. Britt Mandelo's We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Truth-telling provided a nice counterpoint to Halberstam, returning to the 70s but moving theory forward at the same time.

The Halberstam books made me want to reread Urvashi Vaid's Virtual Equality yet again, for a reality check on where the current movement priorities came from, to put provisional/ostensible victories into perspective as the Vito Russo biography and the AIDS documentaries also do. I continue to feel there is something to learn from the grim and gritty side of the 1980s, and earlier eras, despite apparent sea changes.

Carrie Devall currently writes SFF at a glacial pace, battles annoying sports injuries, and blogs about books, films, running, and queer theory at www.metrospec.blogspot.com.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 9: Carrie Devall

Reading and Viewing in 2011

by Carrie Devall

The day job took a lot of my time and brain power in 2011, but I managed to get some reading in that was not just odd bits of writing research or about distance running and sports injuries.

Most recently, I have been enjoying the fantasy novel, Redemption in Indigo, by Caribbean writer Karen Lord (Small Beer Press, 2010). Lord's novel is very funny, and it can be read in short bursts which makes it good for public transit reading. Redemption is based on a Senegalese folktale and told in an engaging traditional but modernized style, involves quantum physics in a way that hasn't yanked me out of the story yet, and has some deft characterization and observations about human (and demonic) psychology, with a feminist edge.

The best reading I went to in 2011 was Leslie Marmon Silko at the downtown Minneapolis library. The portions she read from her new non-fiction book, The Turqoise Ledge (Viking, 2010), were funny and devastating in turn, with a focus on animals and the Sonoran desert environment in and around Tucson, Arizona. Silko gets extra credit for managing to provide thought-provoking answers to the dry and reductionist questions that a gaggle of college students posed to her in the Q&A session which were clearly based on their papers they had to write for class.

The most intellectually rewarding and thematically original novel I read this year was China Mieville's Embassytown, which I started after having not been able to finish his Kraken before I had to turn it back in to the library. The plot is essentially a story about a seemingly human species relating to alien life forms in outer space in the distant future and eventual war between these people, but revolves around linguistic and semiotic theory, and likely neurology and/or behavioral theory. I confess some ignorance here, but it did not reduce my enjoyment of the book. A lot of possible alternate readings were evoked in my mind, based on human Earth-based political and economic history. I ended up with the desire to read it again at some point when I had more time to really think about it. The real strength of Embassytown to me was that this definitely did not feel at all like a story I had read before, which is a rare event even in the theoretically wide open world of science fiction.

The other standout novels I read in 2011 were Lauren Beukes' Moxyland and Zoo City (Angry Robot Books, both). My ears perked up when Buekes won the Campbell award a year or two ago, but the books were not really available in the U.S., so I kept periodically checking the Angry Robot site for quite awhile. The Zoo City paperback showed up at Dreamhaven books right when I needed something to read for a two-week work training in a less than exciting city. I enjoyed reading both books, but I ended up with mixed feelings about the (multiple) points of view in each book, which felt to me oddly color-blind regardless of the characters' race and positioning in society.

This clashed with the plots, which are built around and broadly parody corporate capitalism and government-corporate economic policies; in a setting like Johannesburg, it just seemed strange. I found it interesting that I found a lot of reviews online saying how great it was that the genre was open to a South African writer but no discussion of the treatment of race in these books about a post-apartheid near future. The treatment of a gay character was similarly normalized in a way that may represent a more liberated future way of looking at sexuality but rang untrue to me. The plot of Moxyland was a little disappointing to me in the very end, as well. I felt like I'd just finished a familiar essay on the evils of consumerist capitalism rather than a futuristic novel, having read a lot of the Sociology/ Economics/ Cultural theory literature on that issue in 2010 and early 2011. Nonetheless, I found both novels fascinating on a lot of levels, and it's hard to find new book with a cyberpunk edge, especially by a female author.

Ted Chiang's The Life Cycle of Software Objects (Subterranean Press, 2010) was also a gripping read. A bunch of software developers get caught up in the gaming world they create to test out some AI creatures. Both the human and 'artificial' characters were so well-written, I got all caught up in them too, even though I have a tenuous grasp on many of the IT concepts involved (mostly from other SF books).

I went to several joint readings by some local friends and was inspired to read their books. C.M. Harris has two books out, Mother Glory (Spinster's Ink, 2009), a multi-generational story spanning several eras about a midwestern family that runs a religious sect and has a lot of queer folks mucking up the works, and Enter Oblivion (Casperian Books, 2011), a gay male romance set in a British glam rock setting. Being a Bowie fan I had a soft spot for the latter, but Mother Glory is more wide-ranging and complicated. Catherine Lundoff, a Wiscon regular, has a couple books out recently too, an anthology and a short story collection I have only heard snippets from so far A Day at the Inn, a Night at the Palace and Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2011). The anthology, edited with Joselle Vanderhooft, Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic (Flyleaf/Drollerie Press 2011), was a good transit read: a decent variety of stories to keep things interesting and a really beautiful cover to boot. Plus there is not exactly a glut of recent lesbian SFF anthologies on the market...

Speaking of short stories, a few this year really stuck in my mind. “White Lines on a Green Field,” by Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean, Fall 2011 issue) was very funny and a nice take on the Coyote tale, not an easy thing since Trickster stories regularly get a good workout in the genre. My Clarion West classmate ('07) Dominica Phettiplace had a cool story in Asimov's, “The Cult of Whale Worship” (October/November 2011). CW alum ('08) An Owomoyela had a couple stories published this year that made me a fan. “God in the Sky” was Asimov's (#421, March 2011), “All That Touches the Air” was in Lightspeed (4/11), and these led me to some older stories on the web including “Abandonware” (Fantasy, 6/10). Lightspeed had some other memorable stories, including “The Kingdom of the Blind” by Maureen McHugh (11/11 issue) and “Manumission” by Tobias S. Buckell (7/10 issue, but I got to it in 2011). I also spent a good deal of time poring over the Paris Review summer issue that included interviews with William Gibson and Samuel R. Delany, with awesome old photos from both of them.

A couple movies stand out. Source Code, directed by David Bowie's son Duncan Jones, was a very watchable scifi movie with Jake Gyllenhall as lead, though I can't say I thought it was profound, or as good as his first movie, Moon.

I found the documentary We Were Here very moving. It's basically talking-head interviews with several gay men who survived the AIDS epidemic in 80s San Francisco, with some old footage. I'm biased because I was there too, as a member of ACT UP! SF and other AIDS activist groups, and knew many of the people they were talking about, but other audience members also seemed to have become caught up in the stories. The documentary was recently nominated for an Academy Award, so it may make it out into some sort of general release. A guy who was leaving the theater said he felt like it said nothing new to his generation, who lived through the 80s, but it seemed like many audience members of all ages (at a benefit for an AIDS service organization) were unfamiliar with basic things like the Names Project quilt and the right wing calls for quarantine of all gay men or people with HIV in the U.S. in the1980s.

Some of the commentary in “We Were Here” was annoying, like the white guy who said he felt no other community had gone through a similar experience. I had flashbacks to all the consciousness-raising arguments in ACT UP meetings about race and class and why “we” should care about Haiti and Africa in that moment. And some issues were very depoliticized, partly because ACT UP's role was barely mentioned. Hello, they did not just hand over drug treatments that easily, it took some very direct action, again and again, to cut through a ton of red tape, ignorance, fear, and downright hatred. But I liked that it focused on a small community who was both broadly and deeply affected, because it made the stories very accessible. And I also liked that it focused on what it means to 'survive' as much as the historical facts of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s, while still providing a basic historical overview.

I really like traditional musics, especially with banjos and mandolins, but it's not so easy to find bands that don't have “old-fashioned” attitudes, in one way or another. The Carolina Chocolate Drops came to town and though I did not get to go to the show, I bought a CD. (Heritage, dixiefrog.com) Old-timey spare arrangements with lush vocals and a smattering each of banjo, fiddle, resophonic guitar, akonting (a Gambian banjo-precursor), jug, bones, and drums are focused on their stated goal of rehabiliting the old Black string band tradition, in the North Carolina Piedmont style. They collected songs from elderly fiddlers and singers in rural N.C., and also pulled stuff from old records. There are some originals including one based on Schubert's “Erlkonig,” and songs from another member who has been performing African music and drumming for over 30 years.

For local Twin Cities musicians, I also have to recommend Black Blondie, a sort of jazzy contemporary rock-folk band that is mostly female, and the Doomtree hip hop collective, who were recently featured in a funny interview/spread in our free paper, the City Pages (.com). The reunited Tom Tom Club opening for the Psychedelic Furs at First Avenue (think “Purple Rain”) was a great concert; the frontwomen had tons of energy and a great sense of humor. “Whatcha gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm going to have some fun...”

Finally, for people in or near the Bay area, if Margo Gomez' latest show is still at The Marsh in San Francisco (it keeps getting extended), or she takes it somewhere else, “Not Getting Any Younger” is wicked good. I laughed throughout the whole thing, even though I've seen many of her prior shows. A lot of heads were nodding at her musings about aging, ageism, families, and growing up in Da Bronx, old school. As she said with justified pride, she is one of the “pioneer” out lesbian comics.

Writing this mostly made me look through all the lists of books and stories I need to get around to reading, which are longer than the lists of the ones I finished this year. It's (always) time to get cracking...

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Carrie Devall is a speculative fiction writer and reader. She blogs a bit at metrospec.blogspot.com and otherwise works at the day job a lot these days, producing a lot of timeless legal prose.