Category: Gabbler Recommends

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Asexuality and the Baggins Bachelors: Finding My Counterparts in Middle-earth’ by Isobel Granby

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

It was not until I took a class on Tolkien in the third year of my undergrad studies that I started thinking about this more seriously. My professor pointed out the distinct lack of female characters in The Hobbit, as well as the lack of a love story in it, and asked us what we thought. Aside from the implication that a woman would necessarily act as a love interest (an infuriating assumption that my professor didn’t intend, but that is another conversation) there was the subject of romance brought into the open, and its absence noted. I do wish that there had been more women in Tolkien’s work, not least because I love those that he did write as fully fledged characters. The lack of a love story, though, did not (and does not) bother me.

By that point I was past the age of pretending to be above such things as romance: I’d realised that I did like it, I liked reading about it, I was a little uncertain about myself in regards to it, and I wasn’t keen on the notion of sex. It was nice that other people liked it so much, but I wavered between thinking that I was too young for it (I was perhaps 21 at the time of the course) and thinking that I was too busy (I was, as mentioned, a third-year undergrad and one of those who was constantly overwhelmed by something or other). The fact that there was no love story in The Hobbit had frankly gone over my head.

Bilbo never seems inclined toward romance, certainly. From the beginning, he lives comfortably alone, welcoming visitors—the consummate host, and probably an excellent friend. Following his adventure, he settles down again to enjoy his newly increased wealth and later adopts Frodo, finding familial fulfilment in the role of cousin and guardian. There is none of the emptiness or brokenness that accompany stereotypes of single people, and though the neighbourhood thinks him eccentric, Bilbo remains confident and popular right up to his famous disappearance on his eleventy-first birthday.

[Via]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Queer Visibility & Coding in The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle’ by Hannah Abigail Clarke

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

Joking aside. There’s a part of this novel, spoiler-alert I guess, where a man magics the unicorn into a girl-shape to protect her. She fucking hates it, is horrified by it, tears at her body and laments that being a girl feels like dying. The man assures her that she’s still a hot questing beast, so it will be okay. And after a while, it almost is. The girl-shape naturalizes. It lets her fall in love, which is nice. She almost believes that the girl-shape fits her, forgets it’s even a shape at all. Something goes flat behind her eyes. Then she’s a unicorn again and nobody ever sees her again, because she’s saved the unicorns and now is off in her woods (not?) dealing with the fact that she has feelings now.

Lots of people gave me, and continue to give me, my girl-shape. I am almost used to it now. Despite the soul-grinding banality of misplaced assumed girlhood, commonly associated pronouns and all, one acclimates to it after a lifetime of living under its banner. For clarity, until recently, I was a being with long blond hair. My eyes aren’t purple, because I am not an anime character, but outside of that, unicorn-as-girl and I had comparable forms. We were deemed beautiful, and valuable, for similar reasons—we were absent-minded half-feral bony little white girl wisps, a phenotypical categorization that Disney and other overlords have aesthetically lofted for rancid reasons for some time now. I was raised by a culture that designated me a good questing beast. Unicorn-as-girl and I have that in common. Perhaps because of this book, I have a thing about my gender perils and being hunted, which maybe explains some of the deer stuff in my novel, The Scrapegracers.

Girlness is tricky. The unicorn has a vexed relationship with her girlness, but she remains tethered to it because girlness allowed her to access and comprehend certain kinds of love and affection. Likewise, I am deeply fond of the word ‘lesbian’ because of the ways that word flags affinity, even and especially because of how people like me complicate its definition. I love women and associates. I am an associate. No boys allowed. It is a productively incomplete and partial word, but it also is the best one I’ve found to illustrate the sort of love I’m interested in seeking out. It gestures toward the sort of yearning I tend to undergo. Yearning’s the name of the game.

Thank you, Peter Beagle, for the yearning. This book is nothing if not a crash course in how to miss people you haven’t met yet and long for doomed affection, which is a lesbian pastime if ever there was one. This book is all about desperately reaching for alike strangers, because you have some marrow-deep understanding that your existence is tied with the existence of people like you. You’re not the only damn lesbian in rural Ohio. Actually, there are lots of them, and also there are places that aren’t Ohio. Maybe go to those places. You might have to undergo some narrative tomfoolery in pursuit of these other lesbians, but it is a worthy pursuit if ever there was one.

[Via]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘We live in a multiverse of multiverses, but what does that say about us?’ by Cassandra Landry

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

The multiverse as an internal salve is perhaps a new function. Where before the concept reflected new horizons brought by advances in technology, or warnings about the fragility of victory or political recklessness, one comfort of these contemporary narratives is confirmation that none of this is fixed. All we’d have to do is act, and we’d have, in essence, heralded a “new” dimension.

“How else do you notice the detail of your own life? I think that’s what great fiction does,” Day says. “Books or shows that engage with this question can really sharpen your eye to things that you might not have noticed — and those things are the best things about being a human being, I think.”

•••

In August 2017, a video was uploaded to YouTube of a small flash mob assembled before Trump International Hotel in New York City. It’s during winter, or maybe spring; the trees are bare and the dancers are in coats. The group begins to perform the Five Movements featured in Netflix’s “The OA” — movements (choreographed by this dimension’s Ryan Heffington) that have the power to open a portal into another dimension.

“Would the power of the Five Movements work to protect us all from the darker forces at work in our country and the world?” the description wondered. We want to believe it could be that simple.

…

The research phase of “The OA” had a similar effect, as Marling and Batmanglij met and interviewed those who have survived brushes with death. “They have gone through something that the rest of us are just asking big questions about, living with a constant, unacknowledged terror at the fragility of our bodies,” she says. “They don’t seem to have that preoccupation, or the quiet fear that comes with it.”

Does great art have the power to replicate that crossing of the proverbial River Styx?

“What I have felt in my life from really great fiction is the sense that my vulnerability is not unique. That somebody else from the void is extending me a hand in solidarity. You don’t feel alone,” Marling says.

In the multiverse, we can die, in a broader, less weighted sense, leaving our known selves behind, so that we can really live. “Whether you’re using metaphor, or you’re using math, you’re just trying to articulate some sense of things,” she says.

[Via]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: “On Niche Audiences, Immersive Media, and Publishers’ Myopia” by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

That kind of reality distortion filter combined with prioritizing chasing bestsellers, the primary audience for which is typically defined as “white, middle class women readers, and their book clubs,” leads to things like The Witcher being framed as a niche IP; American Dirt as a disingenuous representative of #OwnVoices; and vibrant communities co-opted and reframed to fit, and prioritize, the white gaze.

…

How a publisher defines, segments, and prioritizes its audience impacts every decision it makes about every book it acquires, publishes, and markets. As I noted in the new annual report for the Panorama Project, despite the growth in ebooks and audiobooks over the past decade, there are reportedly fewer people reading books today, and fierce competition for their attention and discretionary spending. In the absence of any major consumer research focusing on how book consumption and purchasing behavior has changed over the past five years, there are many unsupported theories attempting to explain why consumer ebook sales plateaued, and then began a gradual decline.

Consumer pricing, library lending, and self-publishing are believed to be among the primary factors, while little consideration has been given to the impact of other forms of digital media that have experienced exponential growth—including film, TV, and gaming.

[Via]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Return Them’ by Margaret Day Elsner

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

Harry and company don’t steal Fluffy from Hogwarts, nor did they bring him there. Hagrid did, after he bought him from a “Greek chappie” under less-than-legal circumstances (*cough* animal trafficking *cough*). This is a far cry from the violent episode you’re probably imaging with Heracles literally dragging Cerberus out of the Underworld. But Timothy Gantz points out in his 1993 book Early Greek Myththat the iconography of this episode, and its development, depicts a shift in attitude about Heracles’ involvement in this labor. Early vases show him violently storming the Underworld to steal Cerberus; later ones show a more gentle encounter with Persephone allowing Heracles to borrow Cerberus. So while Heracles doesn’t necessarily steal Cerberus every time this episode is recounted, he does participate in the movement of an exotic animal across borders — with no real intention of returning him.

But we shouldn’t pillory Heracles as a proto-animal trafficker. Animal trafficking as we know it, the illicit trade for everything from bushmeat to elephant tusks to illegal house pets, just didn’t exist in the ancient world. What did exist in Antiquity was animal hunting, specifically exotic animal hunting. Think crocodiles from Egypt, panthers from Greece, and elephants from north Africa. Big game from conquered locales played a huge role in the Roman Empire, marching alongside war captives during the imperial triumph. Our earliest account of foreign animals’ participation in processions comes from Josephus’s description of Vespasian’s and Titus’ triumph where “beasts of many species were led along, all decked out with the appropriate adornments” (7.136). Exotic animals, dressed up and subjugated like their human counterparts, were paraded through the streets as prisoners, then later slaughtered in the amphitheater during the ludi, or games. The more fantastic the beast, the better.

So while these fantastic beasts weren’t trafficked, they were displayed as symbols of Rome’s power. And that’s what Cerberus/Fluffy does for his conqueror. Like the emperors Titus and Vespasian, in capturing and later displaying Cerberus to Eurystheus, Heracles didn’t display the might and prowess of the hellhound but his own. Similarly Rowling displays her own literary and cultural prowess when she places Fluffy at the trapdoor leading to the Sorcerer’s Stone. Here, she takes a prominent, seminal image from Western literature and adapts it for her own purposes. And she does so in a pretty clever way by placing Fluffy at the beginning of Harry’s katabasis (a descent into the Underworld) and associating him with heroes like Orpheus, Heracles, and Aeneas.

But who owns Fluffy? The ancient Greeks are no longer alive, and their stories no longer hold any real religious weight. You could point fingers at Rome, but Rome “appropriated” Greek culture long ago (part of a larger drive in Roman society to assimilate conquered cultures). Greek mythology now resides in the foundations of Western literature and art: you can plagiarize its particular iterations but not its general ideas. This is why Greece can argue for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles but not, say, the dismantling of Washington, D.C. And yes, on Cerberus you could argue that Vergil cribbed Homer, and Dante Vergil, but whoever came up with Cerberus first is long gone — and he’s ripe for the taking.

[Via]