The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2017, pt. 22: Jackie Hatton

The Power of Reading, Viewing and Listening

 by Jackie Hatton

2017 was a sad year for me. I lost three very good men who were central to my life, my family, my history. It made no sense. It made me angry. It made me numb. Every book I read tasted like cardboard. Every song reeked of cheap sentiment. Television series and movies all felt too glossy, contrived. I was bereft of my usual comforts and pleasures. 

Then along came The Stars are Legion.  I don’t think I need to describe this book — Kameron Hurley has rightly won prizes and plaudits and widespread recognition for her all-female space opera. I don’t want to talk too much about the politics of the work either — Hurley’s exploration of the relationship between power, sex and violence was interesting but not entirely unexpected. Her philosophical contemplations ran deeper — the concept of total recycling and women giving birth to parts of a world was perfect fictional musing for the existentialist in all of us — but that was still not what hooked me on this work. What I really loved was the way that Hurley’s powerful evocation of emotion under pressure — anger, despair, passion, compassion — managed to budge my frozen heart and blow out the cobwebs settling into my mind.

Suddenly I could feel and think again.  Women fighting futile and inexplicable battles against enemies they don’t fully understand, in the name of misguided ideologies and loyalties, for the sake of saving a world that is randomly cruel and falling apart anyway. Death on every page, death of the body, death of the planet, death of dreams, death of relationships. Talk about parallels with absolutely everything. I stayed awake at nights for a week completing this book. I was of course awaiting some kind of pay off — rebirth, realization, hope — and luckily I got it. This is a book that has strangely helped me to accept and process the inevitable cycle of life.

At around the same time that I completed The Stars are Legion I finally found something that was emotionally, politically, and philosophically compelling to view as well. After spending too much time bingeing on Netflix series that feel generic to me — too slick, too many hooks, no true end in sight, just a never-ending bag of glossy tricks that didn’t satisfy — I discovered a BBC1 (UK) box-set of a six-part drama series called Broken.  This is the story of a flawed (but decent) Catholic priest who is struggling with his faith as he attempts to help parishioners in one of the poorest of northern neighborhoods. There is a single mother struggling both to make ends and to curb her temper, there is a woman with a humiliating secret planning suicide, there is a mother seeking justice for her mentally ill son, shot dead by the police, and there is the policeman struggling with his conscience. Those are just the main characters. Every single person on screen matters in this drama — every single human interaction reveals a little something about the nature of our endless human struggle with forces both without and within. Television drama used to be like this — writ on a smaller scale, digging deeper, speaking to things we know or want to know, giving us pause rather than cheap distraction. Written by one of the keenest observers of the English class system — Jimmy McGovern — and with a cast led by Sean Bean and Anna Friel I cannot recommend Broken highly enough. It is not a Netflix series. You will have to work a little harder to get it, same as you will have to work a little harder to watch it, but I like to think that you will feel better for it. I did. I felt genuinely uplifted by it.

In a year filled with bitter-sweet memories I sought out new, not old music. No endless replays of David Bowie and Tom Petty for me.  Instead I looked for music that would not remind me of anything, music that would take me elsewhere. Shazam helped. I would sit in bars and cafes, point my phone at the speaker and discover new tracks. This is how I found Alice Merton, a German-Irish singer-song writer, who sounds more like Sia than Sinead. Her debut single, No Roots, is a brightly soulful number that will have your shoulders dancing in spite of yourself. In a year when I had no choice but to confront the practical and emotional consequences of a nomadic life this song spoke to my soul.  Rather than choose to be sad about her own lack of deep geographic roots, Merton embraces a life in motion. No Roots is a song of honesty, reflection and acceptance. It is my song of 2017.

Happy New Year, Fellow Aqueductistas.

 

Jackie Hatton was born in Australia and lives in Amsterdam. She spent a glorious girlhood in Tasmania, came of age in the suburbs of Melbourne, became her own person at Melbourne University, then jumped at the opportunity to move to the US for graduate school. She was taught by a long series of strong-minded women who encouraged her in many different ways and to whom she is permanently indebted. After completing her Ph.D. in American Women's History at Cornell University she has done many different things, most of which fall under the rubric of "pen-for-hire." Aqueduct Press published her novel Flesh & Wires. You can find her at www.jackiehatton.net.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2016, pt. 9: Jackie Hatton

The Joy of Books Set Very Far Away...
by Jackie Hatton


 This was a hard year for feminists, humanists, and our troubled, struggling, divided world in general. The news was depressing and incessant. Facebook was worse. I turned off the noise whenever possible and sought refuge in books that transported me to wonderfully different and remote places. In 2016 I spent a lot of time escaping off-world. Accordingly, my greatest hits list for this year is a selection of books that take the reader far away from the buzzfeed of the here and now. In spite of the fact that they all explore the ubiquitous contemporary problems of inequality, suffering, and the damage that self-serving politics do to societies, these books nevertheless proved a great salve for my weary mind. The best kind of science fiction not only opens our minds to other ways of seeing, thinking, living, and relating; it changes the very way that we feel. There is nothing that renews the spirit quite like getting Very Far Away sometimes.

Emma Newman: Planetfall (Ace/Roc, Nov 2015) One troubled woman’s account of the perils of following ideology to the end of the galaxy.


Carolyn Ives Gilman: Dark Orbit (Tor/Macmillan, 2015) First contact, literally in the dark, great stuff for stretching the imagination.


Lily Brooks-Dalton: Good Morning Midnight (Random House, 2016) Loneliness and the human need to connect, even when there’s nobody else out there.


Cixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem (Tor, 201) The cultural revolution meets a metaphysical first encounter story.


(Our own) L Timmel Duchamp: The Waterdancer’s World (Aqueduct Press 2016) An array of formidable women shape the destiny of a very unlikely planet colony.

And luckily for me as I head into the winter reading season, some of these great books already have sequels (or companions). Look for After Atlas by Emma Newman and books two and three of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series—The Dark Forest and Death’s End—by Cixin Liu.

Jackie Hatton was born in Australia. She spent a glorious girlhood in Tasmania, came of age in the suburbs of Melbourne, became her own person at Melbourne University, then jumped at the opportunity to move to the US for graduate school. She was taught by a long series of strong-minded women who encouraged her in many different ways and to whom she is permanently indebted. After completing her Ph.D. in American Women's History at Cornell University she has done many different things, most of which fall under the rubric of "pen-for-hire." She lives in Amsterdam. Aqueduct Press published her novel Flesh & Wires last year. You can find her at www.jackiehatton.net.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2015, pt.6: Jackie Hatton

Reflections on Reading, Viewing, and Listening Pleasures in 2015
by Jackie Hatton 

Away from home more than usual, I read virtually everything on my Kindle this year. The Kindle is great for creating your own portable library. It is less great for replicating the experience of reading a book. Everything blurs together in the sameness of presentation. There is no physical beginning, middle and end. I am sad to say that in some ways I am left with the sensation of having read one very long book with different chapters: walking with a Shakespearean troupe in a post-apocalyptic landscape (Station Eleven), converting the space station to a colony (Seveneves), heading out into space in search of a new home galaxy (Aurora). I am also a little sad that some of the great books I read this year will never sit on my shelf: How ironic that I only own Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium in digital form, given that it is a book about a society of which nothing is left but disintegrating code. When I went to write this blog I had to confer with my e-reader, an experience that will never compare to scanning ones shelves. Speaking of which, my physical bookshelf is starting to look kind of dated thanks to my new digital library. I miss all the shiny covers, the extra blurb material, the visual pleasure of a row of titles, and particularly the nerdy joy of lining them up in whatever way makes you happy (I go for my own version of the Dewey system of classification, books of a feather all together, plus an orderly presentation according to the size of the book). Next year I’m buying more paper.

In a year defined by my digital diet, rushing from e-location to e-location, devouring words without stopping to really give them the attention they deserved, one book did stand out above all the rest: Claire North’s Touch. The story of a very modern ghost — identity indeterminate, running from ghost-hunters, leaping from experience to experience, only sometimes caring about the fate of the people it inhabits, driven almost entirely by an overpowering instinct for self-preservation — Touch proved terrifying, mesmerizing stuff, even in spite of the Kindle. The fact that this book got me to identify and empathize with an amoral and amorphous character that switches into a new body every few pages is a testament to North’s skill as a writer. The prose is as crisp and clear as the truth is elusive. A gender-ambiguous speculative masterpiece.

Netflix gives me the same feeling as the Kindle — one long continuous movie/series — and all suddenly with that high-def, day-time soap-opera look and feel. I wish I had never bought a smart TV. I am so glad that the person who set it up could not persuade me to throw away my old DVD player. One of the great delights of this winter was ordering a bunch of Scandinavian series (subtitles and all) on old-fashioned DVDs (which may stick but will never cut out to reconnect to the internet or go blurry when the system is busy) and settling in for the kind of viewing that requires concentration and defies multitasking. I began with the Danish version of The Killing, which features an enigmatic aran-sweater-wearing female detective and plenty of grimly beautiful Nordic scenery. Although The Killing proved to be wonderfully gritty northern fare, it also turned out to be a mere prelude to the deeper and darker series, The Bridge — a Danish/Swedish collaboration featuring a leather-clad female detective with Asperger’s syndrome who is trying to solve a bizarre mystery while struggling to overcome personal and professional challenges. And even better than The Bridge was the Danish series Borgen — following the trials and tribulations of a female politician looking to become the first female prime minister. Borgen offers a serious, yet dramatically human, view of the challenges faced by women in politics as well as a nice glimpse behind the scenes of a successful socialized democracy. Unmissable in my book! And still there was more to come…

My favorite of the recent Danish offerings is The Legacy — the story, amongst other things, of a female art-director’s attempt to manipulate her siblings out of their inheritance (for a good cause). Beautiful and moody, this story revolves around the decaying great house that was once the home of a famously unconventional Danish artist, a woman with secrets. This is a family drama with plenty of social commentary filmed against a romantically bleak backdrop. Brideshead Revisited meets the Ice Storm. Heady, indulgent stuff. Starring a bunch of strong women. Indeed it is notable that all the above-mentioned series spotlight interesting female characters, perhaps reflecting the strength and reach of feminism in the Scandinavian countries. The Swedish Women’s Lobby recently distributed 100,000 copies of We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Swedish high school sophomores. This kind of proactive, progressive attitude towards women is palpable in Scandinavian television productions. I don’t watch television series for the politics (sexual or otherwise), but it is really very nice every now and again to watch television that doesn’t make me want to scream at the sexual politics.

Listening is as important as reading to me. If I had my way books would all come with soundtracks, music that spilled out of them and into my speakers as I moved through the pages. That said, I feel the same way about playlists as I do about Kindles and Netflix — great as they are for bringing together songs that create a certain mood or time, they are also homogenizing my listening experience; everything is starting to sound the same, constantly forced into an “if you like this, then you’ll like that” auditory blancmange. I haven’t listened to an entire album in far too long. Perhaps that’s why, when I think of this year in music, I don’t think of artists, I just think of songs. Three very different ones stand out: Time by Jungle (an electronic funk/R&B group from the UK); Say Goodbye by Beck (I think you guys all know Beck, but in fact he’s changed for the moodier); and my guilty pleasure for the year, a track by Australia’s hip-hop icons —Hilltop Hoods — and featuring the enigmatic Sia: I Love It.

Next year I’m buying albums ¬— and maybe even a record player. I miss the covers, I miss the lyrics, I miss the look and feel of all those thin spines on my shelf.

Although I didn’t plan it that way, this blog has turned out to be something of a nostalgic reflection upon all those sensory experiences that we are losing as we digitize and stream and fill our lives with electronic tools. I’m certainly open to everything that technology has to offer, including a portable library of books, movies and music — however I know that convenience comes at a price. This year the price seemed too high — and I’m close to throwing my Kindle in a corner and returning to books. Even if they are heavy and cumbersome, they present words to me in a way that is comfortingly different than the way words come to me on my computer. Books let me disappear into reading, which is the way it always was, and the way it should be.

Jackie Hatton was born in Australia. She spent a glorious girlhood in Tasmania, came of age in the suburbs of Melbourne, became her own person at Melbourne University, then jumped at the opportunity to move to the US for graduate school. She was taught by a long series of strong-minded women who encouraged her in many different ways and to whom she is permanently indebted. After completing her Ph.D. in American Women's History at Cornell University she has done many different things, most of which fall under the rubric of "pen-for-hire." She lives in Amsterdam. Aqueduct Press published her novel Flesh & Wires earlier this year. You can find her at www.jackiehatton.net.

Jackie Hatton's Flesh & Wires

I'm pleased to announce the release of Flesh & Wires, a debut novel by Jackie Hatton, in both print and e-book editions. (Jackie read from the novel with other Aqueduct writers at the last WisCon.) Following a failed alien invasion the world left is sparsely populated with psychologically scarred survivors, some of them technologically-enhanced women. Lo, leader of the small safe haven of Saugatuck, find their technological enhancements put to the test when a spaceship arrives bearing two men with both wonderful and terrifying news. Is this the beginning of a new era of reconstruction — or the start of a new battle for survival? Not everyone in town wants to fight every comer. Not everyone in town shares Lo’s mistrust of outsiders. This is the story not only of Lo’s battle to protect the safe isolation of her unique community, but also of her struggle to come to terms with a constantly changing and uncertain world.

Publishers Weekly writes: “Hatton creates an unusual, almost entirely Sapphic culture, and the futuristic technologies she introduces are inventive and terrifying. Her prose style captures the peculiarities of this altered world with broad brushstrokes.”

“Jackie Hatton has taken familiar science fiction tropes – alien invasion, the destruction of most of Earth, advanced technology so incomprehensible that it might as well be magic – and turned them into a story that transcends the genre. Instead of the usual tale of evil villains, weak humans, and one brilliant hero, we get complicated human and alien characters dealing with messy situations: that is, real life in dangerous times. There’s plenty of action, but it rarely solves things in the way that the characters, or readers, expect. If, like me, you’re tired of stories with predictable outcomes, this book is for you. “—Nancy Jane Moore, author of The Weave

“In Flesh & Wires Jackie Hatton shows us real women in extreme circumstances: survivors of disaster, traumatized and divided among themselves, with superhuman powers and all-too-human hearts. As they confront change, we witness their desperation, their hope, their need to discover the full range of their powers. A provocative and exciting debut.”—Julie Phillips, author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon

Flesh & Wires raises questions about community, colonialism, immigration and basic human rights and challenges our assumptions about the ties and obligations of family, community and society in a crisis. You can purchase it now through Aqueduct's site.

Photos from WisCon 39

I tend to forget to take photos at WisCon, except for those I've gotten in the habit of doing-- chiefly of the Aqueduct Press-organized readings. Partly this is because I don't like to take photos without first getting permission from those who will be clearly identifiable in the photo (which pretty much rules out most candid photos), partly because I tend to get so caught up in talking to people that I forget. On our first night at WisCon, I remembered to take a photo of the window of Room of One's Own (which I of course stared admiringly at before entering the store), and a photo of Kath, Arrate, Nisi Shawl, and Margaret McBride at dinner. (Tom was leaning in back in his chair, & so, like me, who was talking the photo, is invisible.)

Hmm. Actually, you can see Tom's arm, the napkin in his lap. The food was Peruvian, and we were all in an exuberant mood and rejoicing at being all together again and attending another WisCon.

Friday, I took a picture of our tables in the Dealers Room. Kim Nash took the photo so that all four of us could be in the photo: this is what it the center part of the table looked like before the doors to the Dealers Room were opened:

Reading on Saturday were Anne Sheldon (who read several poems and an excerpt from Adventures of the Faithful Counselor, Mary Anne Mohanraj (who read from the introduction of The WisCon Chronicles Vol 9: Intersections and Alliances, Jackie Hatton (who read from Flesh and Wires, which Aqueduct Press will be releasing later this year), Andrea Hairston (who read from a novella), and me (who read a portion of "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A., which has just been reprinted in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Sisters of the Revolution):

And reading on Sunday were Eleanor Arnason (who read from The Daughter of the Bear King, which Aqueduct recently released in an ebook edition), Nancy Jane Moore (who read from The Weave), Therese Pieczynski (not an Aqueduct author, but one who writes very much in the spirit of Aqueduct and who read a teaser from a story that had everyone on the edge of their seat), and Lisa Shapter (who read from her novella A Day in Deep Freeze, which Aqueduct published this spring, and who prefers not to be photographed).