The
Pleasures of 2014
by Veronica
Schanoes
This year,
I had it figured out. I started keeping
a log at the beginning of the year,
and writing down everything I read/saw/heard that I enjoyed, on the off chance
Timmi asked me to contribute at the end
of the year. How clever was
that? How marvelous was my
foresight? Look at my planning!
I
kept this list on my beloved netbook. I
saved it regularly. Sometimes I would
open it and pore over it, reveling in my forethought and cunning.
And
then my toddler godson accidentally dumped a glass of sangria into my netbook.
That
was not the disaster it might have been, as I had backed up almost everything
I’d written onto a flash drive, but I’d never bothered to back up the list of
cultural pleasures because, well, it wasn’t creative writing and it wasn’t
scholarship, so it wasn’t a big deal, so what the hell?
The
good people at Computer Overhauls tell me that it would cost more to repair the
netbook than it would to buy a new computer.
Six months later, I’m typing this on my old MacBook, which no longer
recognizes the battery and has to be rebooted every time my godson trips over
the cord or I decide I’d rather sit on the couch with my best friend than by
myself at the table.
So
yet again I found myself in the position of trying to figure out if I have
actually read anything in 2014, or seen any shows, or heard any music. Was the year a wasteland? All I could remember are endless episodes of Dinosaur Train and Daniel Tiger. After
cudgeling my brain tirelessly, I managed to recall these items making an
impression:
1)
Cabaret:
At the last minute, a friend called me up with a spare VIP ticket to Alan
Cumming in Cabaret on Broadway. I had never seen any incarnation of the
musical before. We went to the old
Studio 54 and were seated at a small table about six feet from the stage and
given a complimentary bottle of champagne, which was all very well and good,
and how every evening should begin, as far as I am concerned. The production was simply devastating—not the
story of the tedious young lovers, because who cares about them, but the story
of Germany’s descent into Nazism, the knowledge of what’s going to happen to
Herr Schultz, and the final scene highlighting the futility of trying to go
along with fascism to get along. I admit
to being somewhat surprised at some audience reactions—the audience laughed
along to and then audibly gasped at the final line of “If You Could See Her
Through My Eyes,” the love song the MC sings to a gorilla: “She wouldn’t look
Jewish at all.” Really? You were all shocked? You didn’t know that was coming? This is a musical about the rise to power of
the Nazis. Whom did you think the gorilla was standing in
for? Well, I am Jewish, and as my
experience with the next entry in my list shows, my perspective is perhaps more
specialized than I assume. Alan Cumming
was amazing as the seedy 40-year-old MC trying to pander to popular mood and
those in power. My ideal production
would play up Cliff Bradshaw’s desire for other men somewhat more, but that’s a
quibble about a production that brought tears to my eyes.
2)
Life After
Life by Kate Atkinson – I have been a fan of Atkinson’s for about a decade
now. I loved the magic realism of some
of her early novels, particularly Human
Croquet, and I find some of the Jackson Brodie novels quite lyrical; they
are what I think Douglas Adams’s holistic detective novels aspired to be. This novel recounts the story of Ursula Todd,
born in 1912, died…well, that’s the thing.
Ursula dies many times: at birth, at the seashore as a child, beaten to
death by an abusive husband, and each time she begins again, making different
decisions, with the vaguest awareness that something…strange is happening, a
sort of déjà vu when she encounters turning points, creeping up on her. In one life she murders Hitler in 1932; she
herself is summarily killed by his flunkies, so we don’t see how that
particular endeavor plays out (I’ve always been suspicious of this trope—were
Mengele, Himmler, Goebbels, not also
monsters? But indeed there was such a
fervent cult of personality around Hitler, perhaps this is a case of a man
making history rather than the other way round.). In another life, Ursula visits Germany in the
early 1930s and marries a member of the Nazi party; she kills herself and her
daughter after hearing rumors of the Red Army’s depredations as it heads toward
Berlin. It is of this life Atkinson
speaks when, in an interview published along with my edition of the book, she
says that it was important to include the experiences of German (presumably
gentile) civilians because, after all, “they had it so much worse than
us.” And this is the sentence that
brought me up short. “Us?” I thought. “They
had it worse than us?” And then I realized that her “us” was British
civilians and I felt a chasm open up between my perspective on the second world
war and Atkinson’s. Never, when speaking
of that time, would my “us” refer to, say, American civilians, though that is
what I am. My “us” would always be Jews,
and that will always temper my
sympathy for what German gentile civilians suffered at the hands of the Red
Army. There is no excuse for atrocities,
particularly those directed at children, but for the adults, well—these were
the people perfectly happy to cheer as people like me, their neighbors, were
defamed, vilified, stripped of rights, shipped off, and tortured to death. So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them. That does not mean, of course, that I condone
the rape and exploitation of, well, anybody,
but it does mean that my capacity for sympathy in this case is limited. It means that it would never cross my mind to
say of the German gentile civilian population that they had it worse than us. My “us” in this context will always be
Jews. And I don’t know if I have a right
to that “us.” My family had been in the
US for a couple generations by World War 2.
My grandmother, born in this country, had exchanged letters with family
back in Klevan until, well, until letters stopped coming back, but no family of
mine closer than that suffered at the hands of the Nazis. But. I
know what the Nazis did in the towns my great grandparents emigrated from, and
I know what they would have been only too happy to do to me and mine if they
never had emigrated (well, without emigration, I wouldn’t have existed as my
mother and father would never have met), and I use that “us” anyway. I have rarely felt more alienated from a
writer I loved than when I read that statement of Atkinson’s, and realized that
in no life did Ursula Todd marry a German Jew; apparently Atkinson did not feel
it important for her to explore those events.
It was a profound experience for me, even if not the one Atkinson had
envisioned.
3)
The Girls
at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine – It was not all Nazis all
the time for me in 2014. This was the
year that Genevieve Valentine’s novel resetting the fairy tale of the twelve
dancing princesses in the speakeasies of Prohibition-era NYC (full disclosure:
Valentine is a good friend of mine; I still love this book). I read an early version a few years back and
the manuscript made my “best of” the
year list. The published version is even
better, the characters more finely drawn, their relationships more affecting
and complex. I only wished there had been
more of the book! The relationship
between the two oldest sisters was one that I really hadn’t gotten when I read
the manuscript, but it was a particularly poignant element of the finished
novel. It’s a story that deserves visual
representation of the flashing dresses, lipsticked smiles, tapping shoes, smoky
speakeasies, perhaps in cinematic form, perhaps in comic book form (Valentine
is currently writing Catwoman for
DC). And Valentine writes an excellent
adult protagonist—Jo, the oldest sister, is decidedly not 16 or 18 or 22. She’s in her late 20s, and she feels
older. Trauma will do that to a
person. I recommended the novel before
and I recommend it now. And hey, now you
can read it!
4)
A Face
Like Glass by Frances Hardinge – Hardinge is my favorite living children’s
literature writer, and I don my official mortarboard of authority to say so (my
academic field of specialty is officially children’s literature). But this book took me a little while longer
to get into than usual; I don’t know that it had anything to do with the book,
though I kept bouncing off the central conceit, which is that in the
underground world of Caverna, where artisans make dangerous cheeses, wines that
wipe and restore memory, and perfumes that compel behavior, children do not
naturally mimic facial expressions. All
such expressions have to be purposely studied and acquired, and facesmiths are
responsible for creating and teaching the faces, as well as setting the styles
for faces. Drudges, or the working
class, learn only a few, while aristocrats have vast wardrobes of faces. Into this world falls a girl from the
outside, whose face moves naturally, and her presence wreaks havoc. I kept trying to fit the premise into what I
know of infant and child development and coming up with “But that just couldn’t
happen!” Eventually I had to hand-wave
it for the sake of the novel (though I think I now have an inkling of how
physicists might feel when reading books that include faster-than-light
travel). However, by the time characters
have betrayed our protagonist and felt remorse while other characters,
initially sympathetic, left her high and dry, by the time the complex politics
of Caverna were being overturned by revolution, and a previously devious and
self-serving girl had betrayed and sold out her entire immoral family to do the
right thing, I was caught up in the adventure of it all. Hardinge often writes of oppressive societies
turned upside-down and shaken apart by clever, brave young girls. Having been brought up by leftists, I suppose
she’s writing my wish-fullfillment fantasies.
5)
Marvelous
Transformations edited by Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker – I
reviewed this book for Marvels and Tales,
the premiere fairy-tale studies journal, and I’m recommending it here because
it is a fabulous text for learning the history of fairy tales and the state of
critical thought about them. Most texts
of this sort take a narratological approach, where each chapter compiles
variants of a given tale, say, “Cinderella.”
This book instead adopts a historicist approach, dividing its chapters
by historical era. The advantage here is
that it includes tales that do not normally get anthologized, like stories from
Giambattista Basile’s Pentamarone
that do not have contemporary fairy-tale cognates (it is in Basile that we get
our earliest European versions of Cinderella and Rapunzel), and allows us to
make connections across tales as well as track generic changes from century to
century. The section on contemporary,
post-modern work is particularly good, including pieces by Kelly Link and Nalo
Hopkinson. A particular pleasure for me,
as I had not before read Hopkinson’s “The Bottle Tree,” a revision of Bluebeard
that revolves around the relationship between colorism and self-hatred. It’s a great piece in a great book, one that
will definitely find its way into my classroom.
6)
I’m going to end by talking about punk rock, the
kind that makes you shout and jump and make sparks fly through the air and your
blood fizz with excitement and possibility.
And really fucking loud, too. I
spent a good part of 2014 trying to see The So So Glos play as much as I can,
because if all goes well, I’m going to give birth in late June, and I suspect
my going to punk shows will be sharply curtailed for a year or two. I have not felt like this about a band since
I was a teenager. Punk rock, when it’s right, when it’s on, is like getting an
electric injection of adrenaline and speed straight to the heart, your pulse
races, and you might explode or die, and if you did it would be worth it, it
would be well worth it, and you don’t care. I can feel the bassline
sometimes inside my ribcage, and it feels like being shaken into pieces from
the inside. I’ll tell you what else I love about the Glos—they look like
they’re having a tremendous amount of fun when they perform. Their last album, Blow-out, came out in 2013, and it’s pretty fucking great. I don’t know what the crossover between
feminist spec fic and punk rock appreciation is, but I have at least two data points,
myself and my friend Psyche, and Amazon once told me that "We've noticed
that customers who enjoyed Maria Tatar's The
Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales also like Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution," so what the
hell. I fell in love with the Glos some
years back when I saw them play a song about gentrification that cut right to
the heart of the matter (“My Block,” off Tourism/Terrorism). They’re older now, and have a manager and
opened Lollapalooza this past summer, but seeing them is still loud and
intimate and lovely. (A
few sentences of this last entry could previously be found on my LJ. Only a few, though.)
Veronica Schanoes is a writer and assistant professor in the department
of English at Queens College - CUNY. Earlier this year, she won a World Fantasy Award. Her work has appeared at Tor.com and in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, Interfictions, and Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 21. She lives in New York City and does not like cats. Her book of criticism, Fearless Children and Fabulous Monsters: Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter, and Beastly Girls, will be appearing
in the near future. She currently lives in New
York City.
