Sunday Bookmarks #2
Happy Sunday folks, This week I am
READING //
One of my gripes with contemporary literature is often their removal from social/political/national events that would have been front and centre of our characters’ lives. It seems there is a precedent for ‘issue fiction’ when the story is built on said event, or it is omitted entirely. For me, Call Me By Your Name has a lot of issues but most striking is the ignorance of the AIDS crisis, that would have been raging back in America before Oliver left for Europe, its’ lack of inclusion felt unjust to the queer love story. The Atlantic wrote an interesting piece on the film adaption a couple of years back.
However, The House Uptown by Melissa Ginsburg (out March 18th) is doing just the opposite, it is telling a story of unconventional family dynamics as a teenager moves to New Orleans to live with an eccentric grandmother she’s never met, following the passing of her mother. It is about art and ageing and the precariousness of trust. it also places hurricane Katrina as a side character, references to ‘the Katrina season, the city pre and post destruction, as a background force not to be forgotten, the residents of this city are all marked by it, thus it must be included and for that, I am very grateful.
I read Zadie Smith’s Intimations in 2020, essays on the pandemic, I bought it on a whim when I saw she was sending profits to charity, as for the rest of ‘covid books’ I have steered well clear, it doesn’t feel like we’ve weathered the storm, taken pause and reflected enough to produce anything balanced and well-considered. However, Together by Luke Adam Hawker is one of those books that is talking about the year like no other, without explicitly saying so. Beautifully illustrated with poetic lines, it comments on grief and greed, loneliness and community. I have just lent my copy to a teacher friend and would be using it this week if I had a class of my own, it will be one to treasure, an almost relic of the year we lived through.
READING (BUT ON THE INTERNET) //
I do try and stay off Twitter, it is a big old bin fire, although useful for health stories and teaching tips, it tends to do more harm than good. In this week’s trending discourse, Joyce Carole Oates (who for the record, I have never read) came out against autofiction, and fragmentary writers of our present generation, the Jenny Offil’’s and Sheila Heiti’s some may glean.
What irks me most, (this seems to be a lot in the letter but I assure you I am not easily irked) is … well it’s a lot but let’s start with her name dropping of a very white, very old, very male traditional literary canon. Let’s move next to her assumption that a novel that does not span 600 pages, must lack risk and ambition. She then berates autofiction for lacking imagination, but Joyce, to tell your own story, to use lived experiences, often of trauma and pain, is to lay yourself bare to your readers, to trust them to take from your story what they need and leave the rest behind, is it that Joyce your own life lacks imagination you worry no one would read about it? or that you view the new literary canon, voices that are queer, marginalized, previously erased from the traditional scope, as lesser worthy of telling? I am thinking back to Washington & Vuong’s conversation on ‘radical okayness’ in queer writing, stories that can sit, in on the fence, those are my favourite stories to read, they reflect reality, give us mirrors, and revel in the joy of everyday life. Granted, fragmentary writing is not for everyone but Joyce, you’ve written it off with an air of privilege and snobbishness I cannot bear. As one reply states, she must attempt to decolonize her mind.
THINKING ABOUT //
Teju Cole’s notion of global solipsism. Through my degree and experiences teaching children I have become more hyper focused on language choices, children are essentially sponges, they will absorb and repeat words that surround them, which can be joyous but also dangerous, as they reproduce the harmful stereotypes and shortfalls adults use. Solipsism to mean knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; In Cole’s context, referring to those who consider them ‘westerners’, ‘living in the first world’ or a ‘developed country’. cannot fathom others, having similar problems to their own, and born is the phrase, ‘first world problems’. Cole, and I would have agree, says such a statement lacks the ability to grasp the full humanity of others, who for a myraid of reasons, both real and imagined, are in places other that the ‘first world’.
You may refer to the wide selection of takeaways to choose from as, a first world problem, or the queue for the car wash as, a trivally first world, the inverse of this is to suggest others who live outside of your world, do not have those same, often small and benign issues, to deal with. Cole says ‘just because you are Black and live in a poorer country, your decisions on which noodles to buy does not disappear’, and he is right. This may seem a matter of linguistic particulars to some, but I am believer in language matters and perhaps that makes my lens more post structarial than others. However these choices contribute to wider ideas and norms, the passive assumption that countries and people who reside there, do not cotend with menial issues, is dulling the need to address said issues with community-led projects, and relying on outdated, white supremacist views, not dissimilar to ‘Africa as a country’, or the red nose day poverty porn appeals, as the only way to help. As a generation, it feels as if we are attempting to lean away from a western view of superiority, so I will start with what I say, and remove first world problems from my lexicon.
Further reading will include: How Europe Under Developed Africa and Known and Strange Things.
LIVING WITH //
I have no long-form writing to share today, the aforementioned surgery has left me living with a short focus temporarily, thus my phone notes consist of random spurts of sentences that I lack the willpower to conjure into something concise at present. However, I am linking here two pieces I have written for other websites in the past, to give you something to read and enjoy. The first is for Sojo, a deliveroo for clothes repair, run by Jojo, who's making waves in the circular fashion community. She invited me to write for her journal last year, about my relationship with my body and shopping second hand. Second, a subject you will know by now is an intrinsically part of me, my connection to the dear old sea, written for another lockdown born baby, Many Reasons To Be Cheerful.
But instead today, is a list I collated this week, contemplating all of things medical professionals and less than well meaning people in my life have told me. It feels like something unique to being somewhat young and ill, we expect illness when aging, we find mortality a scary prospect but declining health seems to be given. To be young and ill, to be ill without visibility, posed a connudrum to most. How can it be, you look so normal? are you sure you haven’t tried (insert completely unfounded medical claim here), it worked for (insert 2nd or 3rd degree person from said person’s life).
Things that are making me sick
Not eating beef
Having a job
Quitting a job
Being depressed
Living at home in my 20s
Having no life direction
Commuting
COVID anxiety
Things that will make me better
Celery juice
Antidepressants
Yoga
Fresh air
Exercising (a lot)
Essential OIls
Peppermint tea
Juice diets
Raw diets
Meat diets
Losing weight
Having a nap
Taking a week off
Not going to university
A holiday
Laxatives
Paracetamol
This is not to say some of things do not help, or provide some relief, hey, I mainlined peppermint tea post surgery and it was one of the only things that relieved the trapped bubbles of co2 surgery left floating in my body. However, when presented as cures by abled bodied, healthy folk, they are irksome. There is no cure to the illnesses I live with, and for some reason that is so hard for a healthy person to fathom. “I couldn’t live like that” they said, well I disagree, you probably could, because you’d have to. None of us signed up for this, I didn’t plan to spend my 20s, or my future 30s being sick, it is not something I take pride or pleasure in, it is something I just live with, so you, abled bodied healthy folk, should be able to too, without desiring to fix me. I am not broken, only to you.
Onto sunnier thoughts, I am big into celebrations, sending a card to a friend for a new job, shouting about someone’s new venture, a bunch of flowers to mark the end of the tiring week or a takeout coffee to start a new one. It may be an illness thing, something about gratitude, or a leftover habit from a mother whose obsessed with sending surprise post. This week I am cheering for another friend I only know through the internet, who lives 1000’s miles away, as she goes into remission from cancer. Cheers to you, my namesake twin, the other Hannah.
Catch you all on another part of the internet,
Hannah