The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt.2: Xian Mao

 

2024 Pleasures

by Xian Mao  

 

This was a year of changes: I finally finished medical school; I was officially diagnosed with autism; I started testosterone. And as I look ahead to 2025 where I will be entering into the next decade of my life, I am filled with trepidation and excitement at the prospect of becoming a human being. On more days than not, I feel less like a functioning adult and more like a puppet. Perhaps that is why this performance of “Confrontation” from Jekyll and Hyde by drag king Pippin Panic is so compelling, and why the story itself compels me out of all classic gothic monsters.

 

 Speaking of monsters, I loved the Dungeon Meshi manga and anime and its focus on the culinary preparation of fantasy monsters. Not only were many of the dishes delicious, but its ethos of consumption as a vital part of being alive was really stirring. I also related heavily to the protagonist and his struggles connecting with others, feeling closer to the monsters he is fighting compared to other adventurers. I had a similar reaction to My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book 2, and how marginalized identities lead to identification with the other.

The video that truly brought me to tears is the September Trilogy by Ava Hoffman, a series of Line Rider maps that tell the personal story of falling apart due to transphobia and abuse, and the arduous task of putting herself back together. The last song, which ironically was the video I found first, feels like the epilogue to I Saw the TV Glow, my (predictably) favorite new movie of this year. Because what can we do when we cut ourselves open and find the truth, except go back to living and living and living again?

 I always feel some nervousness when writing these retrospectives. My years change by summers, so winter is merely a continuation. In addition, I’m still struggling with the ultimate imposter syndrome of being an adult. I don’t know where this shame comes from, but in order to disassemble this panopticon, I want to spend a paragraph on YouTube object shows. Many of these were initially made by teenagers in the early years of the internet, but it’s incredibly gratifying watching animation and writing skills develop and becomes a playground for existential questions, such as how one can find meaning in a predetermined existence in Inanimate Insanity, or rage against an incompetent god in ONE.

As animation targeted toward adults, especially ex-mall goths like me, becomes more mainstream, I find myself drawn more toward imperfect projects made by small-scale creators. The animatics of JazLyte, especially Night Walkies, resonated with me in part because he includes extensive commentary on the process of creation.

 

Here are some last, scattered things I loved this year. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville made me jealous of the expansive, complex world he built. I took the first step in reading Isabel Allende with House of Spirits. Chappell Roan was my most played artist, but my favorite new artist was the British rapper Ren. And while I look forward to taking my niece to see Wicked, I’m more excited about Nightbitch, myself.

 

This is the year I take steps to further be myself. And that means embracing the weird, the childish, the overcomplicated, and the iconoclastic. To bring this full circle, I end with a quote from the first book I finished this year, Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. “There is no end; there is only means.” And I mean to become unapologetically myself, especially in a world that threatens to destroy me. 

 

Xian Mao is a queer non-binary Chinese American writer and family medicine doctor whose works with Aqueduct Press include poetry in Climbing Lightly Through Forests, an anthology honoring Ursula K. Le Guin, and the novella Apollo Weeps, a 2024 

finalist in the novella category for The Subjective Kind of Chaos Award. They also have short stories published in Undercities (Dirty Birds Press), Rattus Futura (Manawalker Press), and Nobody Left to Blame (Owl Canyon Press). Their short play "Fantasy Roadtrip," focused on the relationship between a young adult and her uncle with schizophrenia, was produced as a part of the 2017 DC Queer Theater Fest. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, they have called the Northeast home for over ten years. In their (very limited) spare time, they enjoy knitting, making art, playing video games and spending time with their pets.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 1: Lesley Wheeler

 

The Best Thing About 2020

by Lesley Wheeler

There were stretches, this year, when I could barely read through the haze of worry and outrage. Many amazing books reached me anyway. I spend most of this column on recent publications in sympathy for authors trying to get the word out right now but also because my 2020 reading tilted toward the contemporary. 

 

When I’m low, I look for page-turners: novels high in suspense and full of characters whose fates I care about. Little else can clear the mental static. The experience of reading The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones was perfect. At a virtual convention this fall, he described the story as a slasher—not my genre, usually. Yet even as Jones delivers on the slasher’s propulsive energy, he dissects its pleasures. I’m still in awe of his more-than-human monster (a mother animal) and his intensely moving riff on the “final girl” trope. From an utterly different world, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House also depends on formula while uncovering a genre’s disturbing understory. This school-of-magic tale is set at Yale, where secret societies manage terrible powers whose costs are paid by scholarship students, especially by vulnerable women. Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild offers a riveting Métis rougarou visitation, and Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us is a brilliant ghost story.

As I reflect on the novels that affected me most this year, I realize they’re not only page-turners but investigations of race, class, gender, and social power generally, both well-told and urgent. I needed them and learned from them. For the same reasons, I’ve been working my way through Victor LaValle’s wonderful backlist. I downloaded the audiobook of Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders—about literacy, social mobility, and the bubonic plague—before the contemporary plague was on my radar but found its account of seventeenth-century quarantine close-to-home. 

I also loved newer historical fictions penetrated by tendrils of the Weird, especially Afia Atakora’s Conjure Women and Sarah Tolmie’s The Little Animals. The latter is more than a year old now, but I’m nowhere near caught up with 2019, much less 2020. Among recent works I’m excited to crack is Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston. I did read an advance copy of a late December release by Edward Austin Hall, Dread Isle, and it’s a terrific gender-bending, twisty novel with lots of Jules Verne in its DNA.

 

Poetry also kept me afloat this year, especially when I couldn’t sustain multi-hour literary voyages. Some favorite recent collections are Little Big Bully by Heid E. Erdrich, a manual for how to survive violence through a love of people and land; Leila Chatti’s Deluge, a first book about faith and the course of a bleeding disorder; and Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood, which brims with Virginia history and sharp meditations on mixed-race identity. 

 

  I reviewed Anna Maria Hong’s fabulous Fablesque here, and my review of Destiny O. Birdsong’s Negotiations will appear soon in Harvard Review, but in short, it’s a knockout. For charm-like poems intensified by letterpress printing beauty, see Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s Smaller Songs. Although I have a tiny entry in each and it might seem self-serving, I strongly recommend Annie Finch’s stunning Choice Words: Writers On Abortion; Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, coedited by Margaret Hasse and Athena Kildegaard; and Deep Beauty, coedited by Catherin Lee and Rosemary Winslow. They are wisely orchestrated anthologies, at moments breathtaking. I felt so grateful to receive my copies and to all the other editors and authors who made a tough year better.  

 

 

Lesley Wheeler’s debut novel is Unbecoming. She is also the author of five poetry collections, most recently The State She’s In, from Tinderbox Editions; The Receptionist and Other Tales was a finalist for what was then the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Poetry’s Possible Worlds, Wheeler’s essay collection about twenty-first-century poetry, is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems and essays appear in Massachusetts Review, Strange Horizons, Poetry, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Kenyon Review, and other magazines. Wheeler is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah and lives in Virginia.

     

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2019, pt. 24: Julie Phillips

 A Year of Shifting Perceptions

by Julie Phillips

It’s been a year of shifting perceptions for me, in which some things that have been stuck for a long time came loose, I can only hope for the better. Among my favorites this year are some books and a film about how to take useful action, whether or not you know where you’re heading.

The most encouraging book I read all year was Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy, a meditation on social justice and science fiction that is also a kind of carrier bag for ideas about imagination and change. Emergence has to do with allowing small interactions to become linked together in complex patterns of community and persistence. Taking inspiration from the work of Octavia Butler, as well as from biology and chaos theory, Brown emphasizes resilience and adaptivity as useful qualities and suggests learning from the survival strategies of dandelions, mushrooms, and oak trees. 

She also advises “collaborative ideation—what are the ideas that liberate all of us? The more people that collaborate on that ideation, the more that people will be served by the resulting world(s). Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together.” Citing Toni Cade Bambara, she says, “We must make just and liberated futures irresistible.” 

While I was reading Emergent Strategy and marching in demos, an old friend took me to see Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden’s 1983 science fiction film about women plotting a revolution. It deals with the potential power of small-scale direct action, and I just can’t tell you how good this movie is and how amazing it feels to watch in this moment. Visually and thematically, it illustrates Brown’s patterns of emergence: Gangs of women on bicycles circulate for safer streets. Two pirate radio stations create links between feminist cells citywide. And an older activist (played by feminist lawyer Flo Kennedy) advises a younger one: “Which would you rather see come through the door, one unified lion or 500 mice? You know, 500 mice can do a lot of damage.”

The central narrative of armed revolution is not the film’s strongest point, although a scene of the Women’s Army hijacking a New York City TV station does have a kind of anti-Fox News satisfaction. But its class- and race-conscious analysis of feminism is fine, and I enjoyed its ’80s feminist anti-style (one of my responses to it was “Hey, I used to wear that”) and terrific punk soundtrack. You can watch it on demand here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/borninflames

The feminism of Born in Flames grows out of patterns of verbal exchange, and so do the weird liberating qualities of The Blazing World, the epically strange 1666 work of fiction by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. A friend asked me to write about it, and knowing very little about it, I expected it to be a utopia of place—its creator’s perfect world. What I found was a utopia of process, of dialogue and relationships. The Blazing World isn’t actually on fire, sadly, though it has the usual buildings made of gemstones and so on. Its most remarkable property is that many of its inhabitants are half-human, half-animal—bird-men, lice-men, fish-men, worm-men—and the human scientist who becomes its empress persuades them to help her research the causes of natural phenomena. Where the science of the time placed men above women and the natural world, Cavendish advocated scientific inquiry as interspecies collaboration. 

It’s also very funny. After a while the empress decides she needs a secretary, and the spirits of the Blazing World tell her she can choose anyone, living or dead.

Then I will have, answered she, the Soul of some ancient famous Writer, either of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, Epicurus, or the like. The Spirits said, That those famous Men were very learned, subtile, and ingenious Writers; but they were so wedded to their own opinions, that they would never have the patience to be Scribes.

Instead she asks for a contemporary philosopher like Galileo or Descartes, but the Spirits answer that they’re too arrogant to be a secretary to a woman. Then the Spirits say, why not try the Duchess of Newcastle? So she summons the Duchess, who says, I’d love to, but my handwriting is terrible. And the Empress says, I can live with that. So they start having long conversations and making up new fantasy worlds. Collaborative ideation!

Also in 2019 I wrote about Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue https://4columns.org/phillips-julie/native-tongue. I went to a great reading by my old Voice colleague Colson Whitehead, who is very funny about growing up a nerd as well as a profound and imaginative thinker about the use and misuse of power. I reviewed Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and thought about how subtly she’s always written about the space between individual women and their roles. https://www.julie-phillips.com/wp/?p=1048 I rediscovered the wonderful film Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) by Jacques Rivette, a fantasy in which three female characters stage a jailbreak from a heterosexist love story and go off in search of a better plot.

I was sad that we lost Vonda N. McIntyre this year, and moved by her generosity in donating her estate to Clarion West. Another project she encouraged friends to support was research into the Southern Resident orcas who live in the waters of the Pacific Northwest. When I renewed my family’s orca adoption again this December, I thought of her, of the matriarchal society of the orcas, and how hard it is to keep imagining my way toward others, even though it feels like the work that needs to be done.

I don’t know if that’s part of un-stuckness, but I’m trying.

Julie Phillips is a book critic and the author of the NBCC and Hugo Award-winning biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. She lives in Amsterdam, where she’s working on a biographical look at writing and mothering in the 20^th century, to be called The Baby on the Fire Escape.