december 5
wow folks, I’m doing a newsletter on SUNDAY AGAIN, even if it took a two week silence to get me back in this place. And it’s DECEMBER! It snowed last night here, and I had to clean off my car, which wasn’t so terrible because I wasn’t immediately going anywhere—I mean, I had to go grocery shopping and run some other errands, but it wasn’t 6:55 in the morning and I didn’t have to be at work in a half hour. So it is starting to look like winter, and also like Christmas.
I like Christmas—I like multicolored lights (I have a strand that hangs in my room all year round, which I use to plug in a reading light by my reading chair, so yes sometimes in June I’ll just have multicolored lights on,) I like being cozy and having blankets, drinking lots and lots of warm drinks, I like Christmas music and having strong opinions about it. On days when I’m not out of work too late, I even like how dark it gets early—I like, for example, that it’s 5 pm and it’s dark and I can have my lights on. Yes, there are issues with it—I don’t want to get anything done when it’s dark, but also should I have to get things done when it’s dark? Is it not enough to follow my body’s impulses, to curl up when it’s dark and be cozy?
Work continues apace—I’m pretty busy every single day, but doing things that feel good, and hoping that it all works out. I come home exhausted at the end of the day, but I appreciate my coworkers, and the students, every day even when it’s difficult.
And! I’m still reading! So let’s get to
Books I Wrote About This Week
I’M GROWING GREATER IN MY POWER, ONE DAY I WILL BE ABLE TO READ WITTEGENSTEIN BECAUSE I’VE READ THIS BOOK!!!
I joke but also this was exciting to read—a little nerve-wracking but exciting! I know it’s not a good, healthy practice to even joke that you’re “too dumb” for something, because that’s negative self-talk and also untrue. Reading theory and philosophy is not actually about being smart, it’s about familiarizing yourself with the discourse at play, and while that can take time—we don’t immediately understand a discourse without some familiarity, and that’s part of just participating in them! For example, if you know anything about fanfiction, explaining that discourse—down to even terms used, references made—to someone who isn’t familiar with that world is like speaking another language to them!
But also: I was/am worried I’m Too Dumb for Wittgenstein, a philosopher who many people I read and/or love admire, and whose work I felt like I needed to start approaching. Thankfully friend of the newsletter Andrew recommended this to me when I asked, and boy was it useful! I was still a little worried, because it’s hard to get through a book when you don’t know what it’s talking about, and the early writings of Wittegenstein that are excerpted in the book I really did not understand very much, but it’s fine because the later stuff was FUN and interesting and I enjoyed reading about it very much! And it really boosted my confidence to go out and try to read some of that stuff on my own, so I’m excited to do that! It’s good for me, actually, to make a plan when I want to do a larger undertaking in reading something, and to read around—to try to get a sense of at least what is said about someone’s writing can give me an entry point to read critically towards (meaning to evaluate those claims about the writing critically—it’s amazing to me what people focus in on and how they seem to just wildly miss the point of certain writings, or what I take away as the points… I’m pretty sure I’ve yelled before about the ways people misinterpret the erotic in Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” essay, so it’s like that.) Then I don’t feel like I’m floundering as much, and it can be an introduction to the work and start to familiarize me with the discourse! And I love that for myself, and for all of us as we work to learn new things!
Gasp! My best friend Terry Eagleton and my nemesis Oscar Wilde, all in one beautiful package? What a great thing to read! And truly, this was great—Eagleton exploring the contradictions of Oscar Wilde in a way that I think is more powerful than psychoanalyzing him as a biographer (which I rapidly get frustrated with, because we so infrequently get like actual nuanced takes and in fact get what Eagleton identifies here, this martyr figure. This is why, in 2022, I am starting the Be Mean to Oscar Wilde Club, and you are all invited to be mean to a dead man.) (This is a joke.)
I wouldn’t say that it necessarily feels like the most “realistic” version of Oscar, and not just because realism in fiction is fake, but he is played for his contradictions in a way that isn’t supposed to come off as realism. But the exploration of those contradictions is so powerful and compelling in a way that makes moves towards a kind of reparative reading of Wilde’s life—not in terms of repairing his image, necessarily, but in terms of exploring how we’ve split him into a duality that doesn’t hold those contradictions in either position. And as a person who is resistant to biography in this form for that very reason, and especially is resistant to Wilde’s biography being dragged forward, I find this beginning to be so refreshing and exciting.
And then there’s this court scene. Folks, one of my major Beefs with the way we portray Oscar Wilde in history is the way that we erase the complexities of his sexual practices and sexuality. We kind of just ignore that he had a wife and children? Who he effectively abandoned to run off to fuck dudes (including barely pubescent boys in Algeria)? And like I’m not here to judge per se, but I think it raises some questions for us about his sainthood and his place in like the Gay Pantheon. And I think that gets raised beautifully for us in this scene, in a way that was like. God a real gut punch and so powerful. There’s so much going on in this play—I feel like I could write about 8 different essays about things in it (there’s stuff going on in here about dysphoria that I feel like I need a couple more rereads to unpack) it’s that rich. But it’s also just like the beginnings of an antidote, I think, to the ways that we as historians (and especially those of us in queer history) write about Wilde. It was just so good and man I would kill to see it live (and, in an Irish but also Trans connection, Stephen Rea, who made an appearance earlier in the newsletter when i realized he had a career that wasn’t “the guy The Crying Game who puked when he found out his lover was trans,” (and who thus I should absolutely be allowed to interview,) played Oscar in the original run of the show!) Just a great book and really made me excited again about Terry Eagleton’s writing!
This collection was interesting, because it revealed to me forms of poetry that I don’t find interesting, and the forms I do. There were a couple of poems I might refer to as catharsis poems—in them, the narrator speaks directly to men they have encountered, and describes violent ways to kill them and I. Am just not personally interested in that? This isn’t meant as like a tone police thing, and I’m not suggested that violence is necessarily an inappropriate way to deal with misogyny, though it’s not an avenue I’m personally all that interested in—and I think that’s part of why I don’t really care about the poems themselves.
I DID like many of the other parts of the poems in the text; many are about the overlap of psychological trauma, and traumatic brain injury, and living in the ghostly aftermath of both in ways that DID feel like I connected with and was moved by. And maybe that feels cheap, to only like the poems that I felt reflected my own experiences, but I think really what I liked was the specificity of the experiences, rather than the way that specificity was used as a tool in the earlier poems to describe both the victims and the violence inflicted. It felt like I was expected to just hop onto the earlier poems, rather than be let into them—which sounds like a weird way of phrasing it, but I think what was also weird for me about the earlier poems is the way it sort of felt like it was an assumed universal experience, rather than the specifics of these sensations or lack thereof.
I will also admit to not reading this necessarily for The Right Reasons, though I don’t know how much that impacted my approaching the text; this was the only book I could find by a non-binary Middle Eastern person, written in English (send me more recs though!) So I did read it to cross another identity off my list, and that feels gross, but it did also help me find this book I probably wouldn’t have found on my own, so I’m also expanding my reading horizons not just in an Identity Way, but helping me find new authors who I might not have come across in any other way. I don’t know! It’s a mess! Reading widely is not without its politics!
The Reading Situation
100 books: at the time of this writing, I have finished 105 books! So that’s doing pretty well, and I’m feeling good about it. I’m still trying to get through as many as I can, but some of the pressure is definitely off. (The pressure of returning books mostly on time is still on, though!)
Author identity challenge: at the time of this writing, I’ve hit 15/18 prompts, or 83%! And I have books in place for those last three challenges, so we’ll see if I can make that happen before the end of the year! (This was a good reminder to get those books to the front of my readings, haha!)
Currently reading: Started reading Post Captain, because more hijinks in boats is fun (though we’re currently in Heterosexuality, not on a boat, and it’s like ‘please let’s get on a boat soon’); hoping to finish the Little Book of Restorative Justice, which I’m reading partially for myself and partially to evaluate for work, this week; hoping to finish Burn It Down by the end of the year, so fingers crossed for that!; still chugging through Sexual Justice and maybe I’ll finish THAT by the end of the year too!
HMU
And that’s it for this week! Thanks for your patience as I build back up to doing this, and if this time of year is difficult for you, that you can hunker down and weather the storm. As I always remind myself: every day after December 21, the light lasts a little longer each day! If you want to see my relentless Christmas music opinions, you can follow me on twitter @fadesintointent; if you want to see me very sporadically share my friends’ art, you can follow me on instagram @sonofahurricane. Chag sameach to any Jewish readers, and if there is anything we can do for you in this season, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Take care of yourselves, and each other. <3