Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 19th, 2020 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
“We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.”
I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, a book of short stories - flash fiction, really, in many cases, some of them are barely more than a page. I must admit that I often wanted them to be longer, for there to be more to sink my teeth into - but they do share with Atwood’s novels that razor-edged humor, the wry dark way of looking at the world.
I was hoping that Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom would be something along the lines of a detailed fandom wank guide: allll about the Fanny Price wars! Not to mention a more critical attitude toward Arnie Perlstein, whom she notes is such an obnoxious commentator that message board moderators have been forced to warn each other about him, but this is mentioned almost as an aside. Instead it’s more of a general tour of the many different types of Austen fandom, dipping a toe into the worlds of Austen cosplay, Austen fanfic, Austen profic etc, without getting very detailed about any of it.
However, I did like Yaffe’s summation of Austen’s widespread appeal. “The rich diversity of responses to Austen captures something real about her - the depth and complexity of her writings, which, like diamonds held up to sunlight, reflect something different from every angle. Her stories are not blank canvases onto which we project ourselves; they are complicated, ambiguous pictures of lived reality. We all find ourselves in her because, in a sense, she contains us all.”
I’ve returned to the Eleanor Estes’ Moffat books, continuing the series with Rufus M.It’s poignant to realize that Estes was writing this retrospective about the end of World War I while the world was still in the thick of World War II.
What I’m Reading Now
Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History languished on my to-read pile for ages, but I’ve finally begun it and I’ve learned so much not only about Disney’s female animators, but also about the sheer process of animation, which I must confess I always vaguely envisioned working like one of those flip books where you turn the pages real fast and the sketches appear to move.
(Also, there were at least two different female Disney animators in the 1930s & 40s with powerful interests in aviation. Someone ought to inform Elizabeth Wein.)
I’ve also begun Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a memoir about Norris’s time as copy-editor at the New Yorker and also general musings about grammar. “Sing to me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been beavering away at the story I mentioned last week, the one with the boarding school friends who reconnect after much suffering in World War I, and I have decided that in this pursuit I obviously must read the sequel to David Blaize (although apparently David Blaize and the Blue Door is in fact a prequel and also a fantasy novel even though David Blaize had no fantasy elements? Weird flex, but okay), and also I have REALIZED that this is the perfect opportunity for me to read all sorts of books that I’ve meant to read for ages because they influenced Tolkien and/or C. S. Lewis. Obviously what the readers of m/m romances want is for the characters to have vociferous opinions about William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings.
“We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.”
I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, a book of short stories - flash fiction, really, in many cases, some of them are barely more than a page. I must admit that I often wanted them to be longer, for there to be more to sink my teeth into - but they do share with Atwood’s novels that razor-edged humor, the wry dark way of looking at the world.
I was hoping that Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom would be something along the lines of a detailed fandom wank guide: allll about the Fanny Price wars! Not to mention a more critical attitude toward Arnie Perlstein, whom she notes is such an obnoxious commentator that message board moderators have been forced to warn each other about him, but this is mentioned almost as an aside. Instead it’s more of a general tour of the many different types of Austen fandom, dipping a toe into the worlds of Austen cosplay, Austen fanfic, Austen profic etc, without getting very detailed about any of it.
However, I did like Yaffe’s summation of Austen’s widespread appeal. “The rich diversity of responses to Austen captures something real about her - the depth and complexity of her writings, which, like diamonds held up to sunlight, reflect something different from every angle. Her stories are not blank canvases onto which we project ourselves; they are complicated, ambiguous pictures of lived reality. We all find ourselves in her because, in a sense, she contains us all.”
I’ve returned to the Eleanor Estes’ Moffat books, continuing the series with Rufus M.It’s poignant to realize that Estes was writing this retrospective about the end of World War I while the world was still in the thick of World War II.
“Look!” he exclaimed in excitement. And all the Moffats drew around the stove and looked in. They looked at the word that stood out on the burnt sheet of newspaper. In tremulous, glowing letters lit by the last glow from that burning paper, as though it were seen through the water of an ocean, was the one word PEACE, the headline of Joey’s newspaper.
Mama looked at the word and the children looked too, silently. Then Mama said again, “Yes, you know what that means, don’t you? It means better times are coming now, for all the people.”
And she took the poker and gently scattered the charred fragments of the newspaper and of the papers on which the children had written, so that all the dreams and wishes and plans of the Moffats were gathered in a little pile in the middle of the stove where they soon were wafted up the chimney and became part of the air.
What I’m Reading Now
Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History languished on my to-read pile for ages, but I’ve finally begun it and I’ve learned so much not only about Disney’s female animators, but also about the sheer process of animation, which I must confess I always vaguely envisioned working like one of those flip books where you turn the pages real fast and the sketches appear to move.
(Also, there were at least two different female Disney animators in the 1930s & 40s with powerful interests in aviation. Someone ought to inform Elizabeth Wein.)
I’ve also begun Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a memoir about Norris’s time as copy-editor at the New Yorker and also general musings about grammar. “Sing to me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been beavering away at the story I mentioned last week, the one with the boarding school friends who reconnect after much suffering in World War I, and I have decided that in this pursuit I obviously must read the sequel to David Blaize (although apparently David Blaize and the Blue Door is in fact a prequel and also a fantasy novel even though David Blaize had no fantasy elements? Weird flex, but okay), and also I have REALIZED that this is the perfect opportunity for me to read all sorts of books that I’ve meant to read for ages because they influenced Tolkien and/or C. S. Lewis. Obviously what the readers of m/m romances want is for the characters to have vociferous opinions about William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings.
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Date: 2020-08-19 02:24 pm (UTC)...Is it not that?
Man, the Jane Austen book sounds good but I'd totally have wanted the Fandom Wank write-up version too!!
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Date: 2020-08-19 02:53 pm (UTC)Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield offered some thoughts on the “Fanny Wars:” this phrase is understood to refer to an assumed hostility to Fanny Price which flared up on the Internet when Austen-l was founded after the airing of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice which exponentially expanded the membership of this, other listservs and eventually blog-rings as well as JASNA itself. They and all others from here on in are hampered because the archives from Austen-l from the years 1994-1998 have vanished due to technological obsolence. https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/jasna-montreal-mansfield-parkfannywarsluridnewsgossipfilmshousesnoise/
You can still see a trace of them on Wiki! Fucking LOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMansfield_Park#Fanny_Price
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Date: 2020-08-19 07:13 pm (UTC)The entire Wikipedia discussion page is fascinating. There's even a random drive-by incest joke about red states, attached to the discussion by the most tenuous of threads.
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Date: 2020-08-19 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 07:37 pm (UTC)(Zip discs were such a letdown, though. I lost two long papers to that overhyped storage medium in my college days).
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Date: 2020-08-19 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 07:53 pm (UTC)Honestly, I should have started saving multiple copies in multiple places after the first time it happened, but I wasn't very quick on the uptake.
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Date: 2020-08-19 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 02:46 pm (UTC)Aww, that's really nice, even if I didn't really like that book. (I didn't remember it that well when talking with someone else and mixed it up with at least two other books, which is usually a sign I wasn't impressed by something.) I am STILL waiting for the writeup of the epic Fanny wars on Austen-L -- as someone wrote, "Well before our group read of Mansfield Park on Austen-L we began to experience discussions Henry Churchyard has called "The Fanny Wars" and I think those happened on the Pemberley boards too. (This is inaccessible to me! Bah http://www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions/no36/a-history-of-the-fanny-wars/) That could be a fascinating window into what readers expect of heroines, changing tastes in heroines (that's what she said) and what we think Jane Austen thought of as heroine material.
....man, I studied Morris in grad school and I don't think I've ever read Wolflings. (I was way more into his poetry, honestly.) We read The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End, but not that one. (And if you want more stuff that influenced the Inklings, if you haven't read it, I think Phantastes by George Macdonald? And maybe also Lilith, I think that was an influence on Perelandra.) (I think I bounced right off A Voyage to Arcturus.)
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Date: 2020-08-19 02:47 pm (UTC)....LOL, which (I just checked) was not written by George Macdonald! Whoops. How many Scottish Christian fantasist writers are there anyway?
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Date: 2020-08-19 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 08:03 pm (UTC)William Morris wrote SO MANY books. SO MANY. I'm not sure I'm up to reading that much William Morris... Maybe I can have one of the characters find him unreadable and get out of the problem that way.
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Date: 2020-08-19 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 08:10 pm (UTC)https://myweb.uiowa.edu/fsboos/NewsFromNowhere/index.html
Seriously that solution might be the best way to treat him in a novel, otherwise he may just engulf it!
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Date: 2020-08-19 09:32 pm (UTC)https://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+history+of+the+Fanny+wars.-a0418089193
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Date: 2020-08-19 09:45 pm (UTC)I used to be able to tickle the Google and come up with all kinds of shit, but they redid it a couple of times and now I just poke at it in anger like my dad did.
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Date: 2020-08-19 04:47 pm (UTC)This alone may convince me to read David Blaize (though then again, it might not).
I 1000% approve of the plan to bolster your suffering boarding school friends with lots of early fantasy reading. The AGG brand is very specific and that's what makes it beloved (or will, given enough time for enough weirdos to discover it <3).
I'd never heard of The Fanny Wars (though I'm not surprised by their existence) and sad to hear that the primary sources have been lost.
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Date: 2020-08-19 07:58 pm (UTC)Honestly if readers DON'T want characters to geek out about somewhat obscure topics, what are they even doing reading AGG? (Currently the characters are geeking out about Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and inventing a sequel, the theory of which seems to be "The original didn't have enough peril.")
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Date: 2020-08-19 08:08 pm (UTC)If I ever decide to read one David Blaize book, I'll just go ahead and read both the first one and then the fantasy prequel, to get the full flex experience.
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Date: 2020-08-19 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 09:45 pm (UTC)(It could be a small fire?)
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Date: 2020-08-19 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-20 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-20 01:31 pm (UTC)I had NO IDEA about the whole world of battle and strife around Jane Austen's works. I mean I guess I should have? Since I know about Lord of the Rings fans and Star Trek fans but wow.
There's something painful about the Moffats quote, but I guess there shouldn't be... Like the family should be able to enjoy the prospect of peace without the knowledge of another big war around the corner. ... Wow, this is making me think how great it is not to be cursed with precognition.
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Date: 2020-08-20 07:43 pm (UTC)As far as I can tell, ALL fandoms have battle & strife. This seems to be inevitable among humans.
And yes, the Moffats quote definitely reads differently when you know that it was written/published during the next big war. I've always found it painful how quickly the end of World War I goes from "maybe the War to End All Wars?" to "Nah, there's another big one coming down the pipeline." Definitely by the mid-thirties, people seem to have been bracing themselves, and possibly even before that.
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Date: 2020-08-21 12:41 pm (UTC)Okay, you're convincing with the whole 'back in the day authors just did WHATEVER' argument now. Is the Blue Door David Blaize's Peter Duck? I must ponder this.
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Date: 2020-08-21 12:49 pm (UTC)But yes! Back in the day authors really just did do whatever. No rules, no laws! Can throw in random psychics if I want to!