Trilogy, H.D. (365 Books, Day 325)

Review of the book I read Wednesday, July 20th.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) is not one of the poets I imprinted on early, despite her having gone to my college (they don't boast about it the way they do Marianne Moore). I think it is because she was briefly engaged to Ezra Pound, though fortunately she realized better, and then the whole Imagist label that gets stuck onto her work is discouraging. I am not much on Imagist poetry.

So most of what I know about her I have heard from sovay, who pointed out that I was missing one of the most original women of the twentieth century. Her life is a lovely example of Doing Polyamory Right, and a lot of her work is not Imagist, but riffings on the classical tradition and on Sappho, old myths in new jars. That I find interesting.

Trilogy comprises The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod, which are her Blitz poems. World War II was a very bad time for her. She'd lost a brother in the first World War, and had been to psychoanalysis with Freud in the twenties because she had what was considered to be a paranoiac conviction that a second and worse war was coming. Being proven right was not a consolation.

So her war-poems are an effort to a) argue that the world is all changed, as indeed it was; b) argue that the old stories could be repurposed to the new realities, and that that is what poets and writers and artists are for, in wartime, and so they must not be considered superfluous or less than useful; and c) turn the myths she loved to fit the world around her, that had changed.

The astonishing thing is that she pretty much does it. Points a) and b) go together into the first bit, The Walls Do Not Fall Down, and the other two poems are riffings on c). Tribute to the Angels is the one that's most impressive, if you know much about angel-lore, a densely allusive calling on seven great angels whose names are Biblical and whose purposes in the world are-- not. Her Uriel is a terrifying angel of war: when he is the angel of silence, it is the silence between the bombs.

Her language is modernist, pared down, reminds me of Eliot without his occasional attempts at purposeful obfuscation. When she obfuscates it is because she assumes everyone knows the reference (no, we do not all read classical Hebrew, sorry). Her rhythm is strong and never quite predictable, and her sense of rhyme is true. She does not concede to near-rhymes, ever, nor lets the necessity for a rhyme govern the sense of the words. The form and function are as inseparable as they are with any master poet.

In short, this is lovely stuff, this is brilliant, this is the sort of thing that doesn't make it into the fabled edificiary Western bloody Canon because the author was a mostly-lesbian who had her child choosingly out of wedlock and didn't marry Pound; The Canon could maybe forgive one of those attributes, a child out of wedlock by mistake, say, or respectably monogamous lesbianism, but not more than one, and not marrying Pound may have been deadly anyhow. So her work falls in and out of print, making one to mutter bitter things about Twentieth Century Literature, which somehow feels like a monument rather than a collection of artworks, doesn't it. Poet, novelist, essayist, and master of herself: I look forward to reading more of her.

Paying For It, Chester Brown (365 Books, Day 326)

Review of the book I read on Thursday, July 21st.

I've read quite a few memoirs by prostitutes over the years, because I am interested in memoir and I am interested in feminism and I am interested in economics. Also in sex. This leads to reading memoirs and essays by sex workers.

However, I had not previously read any memoirs by customers of prostitutes, because, well, they don't seem to turn up as often. Chester Brown's willingness to discuss his interactions with prostitutes is very unusual. His unemotional, flatly biographical, non-sensationalist but definitely ideological approach is even more peculiar. The style of his comic is very stripped-down: panels are all the same size, word balloons take up a lot of space, pictures of people walking along streets are pretty much the same picture repeated with different words. The lines are heavy blackwork and there isn't a lot in the way of facial expression. This means that when there is sex, and there is, it is extremely obvious that it is not intended as anything other than careful documentary.

After breaking up with his girlfriend, the actress and radio personality Sook-Yin Lee (who can be seen in the delightful film Shortbus), Brown decided that he was against romantic love as an institution, and began to see prostitutes regularly. It seems to have been a fairly amicable breakup, although his friends took the whole ideology shift as an expression of some kind of inner pain; I wasn't there, I don't know. Brown doesn't think so. He's a pretty libertarian type and believes that prostitution should be legal because people have the right to make whatever paying contracts they want with their own bodies. Eventually he comes down on the side that it's not necessarily love he's against, but possessive monogamy, with jealousy and everything that goes with that; he also admits flat-out that he is not up for the work of maintaining a relationship and is using money to take the place of putting in that work. At the end of the book he is engaged in a monogamous contract with a particular woman: neither of them sleep with anybody else, he loves her, and he always pays. He claims not to know of a word for this arrangement. (She is a kept woman, and in the French court would have been his maîtresse déclarée. It is not as though this is a new setup he has thought of.)

Unsurprisingly, this memoir is a fascinating mishmash of the interesting and the problematic. He (very politely) chooses not to give identifying details of the women he patronized, leaving out their working names, actual hair and skin colors, and anything any of them said that might be used to trace them. This is probably a good idea, given that some of them are engaged in variants of the work that I think are illegal in Canada (I can't remember whether it's illegal to have the prostitute come to one's home or to have them work out of a brothel, but one of the two is). However, it means that he can't depict them as people. He says he's had a lot of interesting conversations with them about their lives and the philosophy of the business and that he thinks they're mostly happy people who chose their jobs freely and like their work: well, okay, he can say that, but the burden of proof is on him, and he does not give enough detail for me to really believe him. In addition, the no-identifying-details thing has the effect of making the women feel interchangeable and adds to the aura that is traditionally associated with prostitution, that customers treat prostitutes as inhuman and interchangeable commodities. I think there must have been a line between giving information that could identify these women and paring down what they had to say quite this thoroughly.

Also, he gives some very good reasons for wanting prostitution to be both legal and unregulated (legal because then prostitutes will be able to get better health care and call law enforcement more easily; unregulated so that the kind of punitive licensing one gets in Nevada doesn't come into play and produce a black market). But he is operating from a position of privilege, serious privilege: he is the consumer, he is a white male with the money in this equation, and he simply does not seem to understand the kind of societal pressure that can drive women into prostitution when it is not the work they want to be doing. He does not understand the relentless pressure put on women by society to be beautiful and desirable; he does not understand the dynamics of the abusive relationship that can develop between a woman and her pimp (just because she may think of him as a boyfriend doesn't mean he can't be exploiting her; I get the impression that Brown is the sort of person who does not understand why people do not instantly leave any relationship that has become abusive, and the reasons why not of course begin with the physical problems of violence); he literally denies the existence of trafficking. Which just. I don't even. Trafficking? Is a major, serious issue, has been forever, isn't going away any time soon.

This is the most interesting mixture of the sex-positive and the wrongheaded. I mean he goes through and tries to analyze whether any of the women he slept with might have been trafficked: well and good, that's a reasonable thing to do, and he concludes that he doesn't think any of them were. Fair enough. He's buying fairly expensive prostitutes in Canada. The odds of them being were low. Cheaper, on the other hand, or in some other places-- What I am saying here is that the author has the flaw of generalizing from his personal experience to universals. He also does not, I think, understand quite how much these women have invested in keeping him happy and in saying what he wants to hear. (Their physical safety is riding on it, as is the economics of the current transaction and the chance of a repeat customer. One thing a lot of the memoirs I have read by prostitutes agree on is that you never tell a customer you don't like the life, because it never goes well, the very best thing that can happen is that they get rescue fantasies and the worst doesn't bear thinking about.)

As a result, I think this is actually a very good memoir, because it demonstrates the mindset-- the things that one needs to think about, the things that one needs to be in denial about-- of a person who is a regular john. And as I said that isn't a kind of book that crops up, much. It's very interesting to get a chance to look into the head of somebody who does this.

Just be aware, it's quite a dense set of things to wade through and consider; I want to yell at him about at least half of it and throw various other books at him. Which of course also makes it a successful book.

aargh

For reasons I don't understand, LJ currently Prefers Not To. I can't crosspost, I can't post manually. I can get at my f-list, but if I try to click through to comments on anyone's entries it won't load. I am giving this another twelve hours before I start trying to do something about it, but it's driving me nuts.

Who knows, maybe this will crosspost. Aargh.

Faerie Winter, Janni Lee Simner (365 Books, Day 327)

Review of the book I read on Friday, July 22nd. Obligatory disclaimer: author is a friend.

This sequel to Bones of Faerie continues that novel's taut writing, interestingly post-apocalyptic worldbuilding, and complicated character dynamics. The war between Faerie and the human world came very close to destroying both: plants are hostile, spring continued without the season changing for decades, and humans eke out a precarious existence battling their own food sources. Children have started to be born with magic. In Liza's village, for many years, that was grounds for exposure on the hillside, but, partly due to Liza's efforts, things are beginning to change. Liza's own magic involves summoning, calling, and being able to tell things what to do.

Because of Liza, winter has come for the first time in her lifetime. The worrisome thing is that it doesn't seem to want to leave again-- how long is winter supposed to last, anyway? And although some of the Fae have begun to view humans as sentient, including the one who has become Liza's teacher, not all of the great Fae think the war is even over. One in particular sees winter as a sign that both worlds are, inevitably, dying...

I enjoy the characters in this; it makes a fine followup to the first. I found the dynamic between Liza and her shapeshifter boyfriend Matthew somewhat too similar to the dynamic between the protagonist and her shapeshifter boyfriend in Simner's earlier Thief Eyes, but hey, I like shapechangers as much as the next person, and at least Simner is managing to avoid the new tropes of teen paranormal romance nicely. I also find it moderately coincidental that Liza's family is so tied up with the causes and duration of the War, but this is the sort of coincidence people have been using for plot purposes forever, so mostly it just causes me to sigh slightly and go well, I suppose one wants to tell stories about people who are close to important historical events.

And I really love the uneasy blend of trust and distrust that Liza has for her mentor figures: she's just not able to trust anyone fully, and she wouldn't actually be right to do so, even the ones who love her, because people do just keep lying to her. The adults are all morally ambiguous in ways adults don't often get in YA.

So I recommend this. I don't know whether you'd have to read the first book for it to make sense, but I read the first when it came out and haven't reread, meaning I don't have a sharp memory of the details, and this worked anyway. It would therefore probably stand alone reasonably well. I think there's going to be a third? This certainly ends in a way that does not require a sequel while still allowing one, as did the first book.

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares (365 Books, Day 328)

Review of the book I read Saturday, July 23rd.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was Jorge Luis Borges' best friend. The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel), published in 1940, was the first novel Casares felt was really successful. He'd been publishing for several years at that point-- in fact he started in the late 1920s, with short stories-- but Morel was where his style came into its own. The introduction is by Borges and the cover of the first edition by Borges' sister Norah. It is, however, definitely a book to be appreciated for itself, rather than for its connection with a writer who turned out to be more famous.

Morel comes from Casares' lasting obsession with the film star Louise Brooks, and his meditations on the philosophical implications of the cinema.

A man, a fugitive, escapes to a deserted island, which has on it only a chapel, a museum, and a swimming pool. The island is generally shunned because it is supposed to be the incubation ground of a terrible and deadly disease, but the fugitive prefers the possibility of illness to the certainty of life in prison. One day, he sees a beautiful woman sitting on the rocks and watching the sunset, despite the fact that no boat has come to the island. A large party of tourists appear to have taken up residence in the museum: they dance on the lawn, they swim in the pool. They have conversations which repeat in a strange way. They play the same two records over and over again, annoyingly. Gradually the fugitive realizes that they are images, the simulacra of people who came to this island at some point previously. But what caused the images? What is making them repeat? And is there any way for him to find out whether the image of the woman (whom he has grown to love) is capable of seeing and understanding him?

This is a novel which knows something about the science fiction tradition-- the name Morel is meant to recall Moreau-- but which is working in what at first appears to be an almost surrealist mode. The viewpoint is tightly confined, and one is never quite certain about the narrator's sanity. The language is spare and taut, and the logic has both the inexorable building of fact on fact that one expects from hard SF and the flowing image-linkages of a dream. It's quite short, more novella length than novel, but it packs a lot in.

Alain Robbe-Grillet would later fall in love with it and cite it as the work that directly produced his Last Year at Marienbad. I am inexpressibly charmed to know that there is a causal link between the career of Louise Brooks and Last Year at Marienbad.

The Invention of Morel is a quiet masterpiece, without a sentence out of place. It's available now from the New York Review of Books press, as are so many wonderful things. It deserves to be read more by science fiction readers and by persons who write about the history of science fiction; it also deserves to be read by people who enjoy suspense novels, or surrealism, or trying to understand odd first-person narratives. In short, it ought to have a wide audience; I never heard of it when I was going through my adolescent readings of all the criticism I could find. This is one of those books that still reads as though it was written yesterday.