Posts Tagged ‘popular literature’
[LINK] “The Gay Teen-Boy Romance Comic Beloved by Women in Japan”
The Atlantic‘s Noah Berlatsky takes a look at an exemplar of Japanese yaoi manga, Heart of Thomas (Thomas no Shinzō), and asks why explicitly homoerotic manga are so popular among Japanese women. Berlatsky comes up with some interesting suggestions.
Matt Thorn offers a couple of explanations. One is historical; Hagio was directly inspired by the tragic romanticism of Jean Delannoy’s 1964 filmLes amities particuliéres, about two boys who fall in love at a boarding school. But Thorn also suggests that there were formal and thematic reasons for the choice. Hagio actually initially tried to set the story in a girls’ boarding school—but found that she ended up wanting to make the action, as Thorn says, too “realistic and plausible.” The result was, in Hagio’s words, “sort of giggly.” Thorn concludes that “It was important that the characters be Other in order for Hagio to explore the themes, some quite abstract, that she wanted to explore.”
I don’t disagree with Thorn’s analysis of Hagio’s motivations, but I think it’s worth thinking a bit more about why and how it’s important for the characters in Heart of Thomas to be Other, and why that would be something women respond to. Specifically, I’d argue that a big part of the appeal of setting the comic at a boys’ school is that it allows male, European characters to be objectified, just as Asian women often are in Western fiction. In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe.
The genre of boys’ love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women—as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire. It is, then, perhaps, no accident that the villain of The Heart of Thomas—a boy named Siegfried—is distinguished primarily by his interest in the Renaissance and by his odd, octagonal glasses. Siegfried’s fetishization of old Europe parallels Hagio’s fetishization of contemporary Europe; his dangerous gaze parallels Hagio’s dangerous gaze. And Siegfried’s abuse of Juli, the protagonist, is congruent with Hagio’s own stylized sexualization of her characters. His desire is her desire—and also, perhaps, the desire of her readers. Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.
But while Hagio may be Siegfried, she isn’t only Siegfried. Rather, the primary emotional point of identification in the book is Juli, or, more precisely, Juli’s trauma. That trauma is, again, sexual trauma—or rape. In this sense, the book does not emphasize, or insist on the distance between characters and author or audience. Instead, Juli’s rape emphasizes the universality what is often presented as a particularly female experience. Similarly, Juli’s shame, his self-loathing, and his tortured effort to allow himself to love and be loved, are all character traits or struggles which are often stereotyped as feminine. The fact that Juli is male seems, then, not an aspect of otherness, but rather a way to underline his similarity to Hagio and her audience. If readers can with Siegfried experience distance as mastery, with Juli they experience an empathic collapse of distance so powerful it erases gender altogether.
[BLOG] Some Monday links
- As mentioned previously, Charlie Stross asks what the big issues of 2013 will be.
- Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait writes about a magnetar’s blast fifty thousand years away that, eight years ago, swamped our solar system with radiation.
- Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster links to and comments upon a Martin Beech paper examining the history of studies and speculation about Alpha Centauri.
- Daniel Drezner is unimpresed by the Republican Party’s lack of learning about foreign policy.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money’s bloggers are unimpressed by Naomi Wolf’s claims about FBI coordination of anti-Occupy campaigns and started a discussion about which countries give indigenous peoples the right to cross international frontiers at will.
- New APPS Blog gets the importance of the Idle No More movement.
- Eugene Volokh asks his commenters, drawing from a recent custody case involving a Singaporean family, whether Islamic family law should automatically invalid international custody claims.
- Whatever’s John Scalzi celebrates the ten-year anniversary of the publication of his novel Old Man’s War.
- Window on Eurasia comments upon a recent Russian study demonstrating that the numbers of guest workers in Russia are much smaller than often mooted in the public press.
[LINK] “Mountains of Madness: Scientists Poised to Drill Through Antarctic Ice and Into Gothic Horror”
Evoking H.P. Lovecraft’s infamous novella of Antarctic exploration, At the Mountains of Madness, Douglas Fox’s Wired article speculates what scientists might find as they explore the frozen continent, its offshore waters, and frozen-over lakes like Lake Vostok. It turns out that Lovecraft had some things right. (Implications for extraterrestrial worlds with iced-over water oceans, like Europa and Enceladus, are obvious.)
What might lurk beneath Antarctica’s 5 million square miles of ice was the subject of speculation by sci-fi writers in the 1930s. One of the icy products this subgenre of Antarctic Gothic horror spawned is HP Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, in which scientists drill beneath Antarctica’s ice — only to discover horrid things preserved there. Now, scientists are finally enacting Lovecraft’s scenario: Over the next several weeks they are drilling into three subglacial lakes hidden beneath thousands of feet of ice in Antarctica.
What they will find as they sample the lakes and send cameras into their bellies remains to be seen. But one thing is already clear: Lovecraft was actually right about far more than his readers could have realized.
In Lovecraft’s story, a team of researchers from Miskatonic University flies into an unexplored region of Antarctica and bores through the ice. They discover fossil dinosaur bones with disturbing puncture and hacking wounds that cannot be attributed to any predators known to science. Soon after, they uncover the source of some of those wounds: fossils of a leathery-skinned beast with a “five-ridged barrel torso … around the equator, one at [the] central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five … flexible arms or tentacles.” The beast’s body is topped by a “five-pointed starfish-shaped” head.
[. . .]
Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness at a time when Antarctica’s interior remained mostly blank. Airplanes had only just begun to venture inward from the coasts — Robert Byrd made his famous, first-ever flight over the South Pole in 1928 — and Lovecraft’s novella, written in 1931, echoes that expedition. It’s easy to smirk at Lovecraft’s five-armed monsters, described ad nauseam, including precise dimensions in feet and inches. It’s easy to conclude that Lovecraft tried too hard to invent something that was truly alien.
But the ensuing decades have shown that Lovecraft was right on one profound matter: Antarctica’s cold wastes do indeed preserve some very old things, some of them dead — and some, still alive.
Geologists exploring one end of the Transantarctic Mountains (perhaps Lovecraft’s “mountains of madness”) have found shreds of plants, dead for up to 20 million years, protruding from the gravel and fluttering in the wind. These mosses represent the last stand that plants made on the continent before being extinguished by endless winter. The subsequent cold and dry have preserved them from decay. Plop a bit of this moss into a bowl of water and its delicate leaves and stems inflate like soft sponges. The scattered twigs of southern beech trees that are found here still contain enough organic matter that they smolder and smoke if placed over a flame.
Not all of the deep-time holdovers are dead, though. Antarctica’s cold coastal waters preserve an ecosystem like no other Earth. Scientists call it Paleozoic, reminiscent of between 250 and 540 million years ago. It is dominated by echinoderms, the ancient phylum of animals including starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and lily-armed crinoids, whose bodies have five-fold symmetry — which brings us back to Lovecraft’s race of five-tentacled Elder Ones mummified beneath the ice.
“They sound like echinoderms to me,” said Richard Aronson, a veteran Antarctic marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology. “Hilarious.”
[URBAN NOTE] “Manhattan’s Only LGBT Bookstore Fighting for Permanent LES Space”
Since the 2009 closure of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City, not only has Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop been the oldest extant GLBT bookstore in North America, but New York City has been lacking in such. I was alerted by Towleroad to news that a pop-up GLBT-themed bookstore in Manhattan is crowdsourcing to raise funds for a permanent location in the Lower East Side.
(The Bureau of General Services Queer Division is a nice name.)
The owner-operators do seem to have caught onto the idea that, to survive, an independent bookstore has to offer more than books, with Glad Day’s combination of book space and community space seeming relatively viable. I hope that they succeed.
The Bureau of General Services Queer Division, or BGSQD, has been operating out of 27 Orchard St. since Nov. 15, creating a community through art and literature events aimed at the gay community.
But with the temporary store set to shut down next month, its owners are hoping a fundraising campaign will give the bookstore the initial boost it needs to make the Lower East Side its longtime home.
“This is a space that is open for everyone,” said BGSQD co-owner Greg Newton, 42. “But it is a space dedicated to supporting queers and exploring issues of gender and sexuality.”
BGSQD is working with local crowd-funding site Lucky Ant to raise $15,000 — the equivalent of three months rent for the store — by Dec. 20, while offering donors a range of gifts and perks for their generosity.
[. . .]
Newton and Jochum’s gallery-like space on Orchard Street is stocked with titles such as “Bi-Curious George,” a parody of the classic children’s series, and Sarah Schulman’s “Israel, Palestine and the International Queer,” about how the LGBT community works together from the two sides.
“You stumble across things, you talk to people in the store,” Newton said of the experience at of shopping at BGSQD. “You find things that might not be introduced to you by the algorithms of Amazon.”
The store’s events calendar of poetry and book readings, live music and gallery nights is another important aspect of the business.
“The social spaces for a lot of LBGT people happen to be bars, especially for men,” said Newton, “but they are often loud, not conducive to conversation… they serve a different purpose.”
While Newton was researching the plight of independent bookstores in the city, he found that creating a community space with events was crucial to success in selling books. He pointed to Word in Greenpoint and Greenlight in Fort Greene as community bookstores BGSQD is looking at as a model.
[PHOTO] “Ingrid Cryns, ‘A Doorway’, 115 The Esplanade”
This poem was by the door of OWN Housing Co-Op, a housing cooperative aimed at older women founded by the Older Women’s Network Ontario located at 115 The Esplanade. The poet, Ingrid Cryns is an architect and artist who, in addition to the poem, sculpted great winged handles for the door.
A doorway, A portal
Opens
What are the possibilities?
Bones
The symbolic structure of our soul
Merging, integrating with
Wings
Our spirit in flight
Soaring
The freedom of our choices
To leave, To end
To enter, To begin
Again
- Ingrid Cryns
July 1997
[URBAN NOTE] “The Night Shift: A Glad Day’s night”
I’ve been meaning for some time to link to Paul Aguirre-Livingston‘s article in The Grid about the ongoing revival of the Glad Day Bookshop. I’ve frequently blogged about the vissicitudes of the place, most recently noting in August (after a blogTO report) the extent to which Glad Day has relaunched as a neighbourhood hub. This bookstore, for so long barely hanging on, seems set to hang on for a while yet.
Almost nine months ago, Glad Day Bookshop, Canada’s first bookstore targeted to the gay community, was about to close its doors—until it was saved by a group of citizen investors. They’ve since turned a chapter in Toronto queer history, making Glad Day a place for very memorable nights.
Last December, when former owner John Scythe announced that the shop would be put up for sale, high-school English teacher Michael Erickson started a campaign to engage friends and allies from every corner of his Toronto network to invest in the project. “Since it’s an institution and an incredible resource for the community, [Erickson] decided that we should save the bookshop,” says Andy Wang, who needed little persuasion to became one of the 22 people (from white collar to creative class) who bought shares in the company. Wang also acts as the shop’s CFO and event booker. Since this re-incarnation, Glad Day has become a fiercely community-driven initiative, says Wang. “Having a lot of people involved is good for having connections all over.” With so much added outreach, the social calendar has become the backbone of its new direction.
[. . .]
Erickson, Wang and co. wanted desperately for the shop to survive, and, in keeping up with the Indigos, the idea of holding events and launches became crucial to the business model. It was a way of enticing new customers to get acquainted with and raise the profile of the shop—fast. Erickson asked the landlord, who was renovating the unused third floor at the time, if the team could rent the space. “It was modelled after our specifications,” Wang proudly explains, as he walks me through Glad Day’s vast collection of everything from thoughtful memoirs to DVDs to vintage erotica.
Upstairs, I overhear a woman say, “Like, what is this? Are we in Trevor’s apartment?”
It’s easy to see why she says that. The result of the renovation was a charming multi-use loft space, with a bathroom, a kitchenette, and glorious hardwood floors. It’s like the most perfect bachelor apartment you’ve ever seen, with standing room for up to 100 guests, making it expansive, yet intimate. And with rentals starting at $20 per hour, it’s a bloody steal. Its availability spread quickly by word-of-mouth. Campbell says he immediately thought of using the space after visiting for a friend’s launch.
Under the new Glad Day collective, the third floor has hosted countless talented minds. The Toronto Gay Gamers (the “Gaymers”) meet here regularly. There was an AIDS Sunset Service, and a night of remembrance upon the passing of Maurice Sendak. During Pride 2012, Glad Day revived the Proud Voices reading series, a program that lasted for three years before it vanished from Pride programming in 2010. There was the debut of the Kickstarter-funded Human Canvas Project. Last Friday night, they hosted the revue-style Loft Cabaret. (Watch a performance below.) The week before that, it was a caBEARet, a night of bear artists and creators.
[LINK] “Archaeologists banned from referring to ancient humanoids as “hobbits””
io9 reported that the company holding intellectual copyright to the term “hobbit”, from Tolkien’s novels, isn’t letting the term be used in connection to human subpsecies Homo floresiensis. See this
Guardian report.Dr Brent Alloway, associate professor at Victoria University, is planning a free lecture next month at which two of the archaeologists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, Professor Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna, will speak about the species. The talk is planned to coincide with the premiere of The Hobbit film, and Alloway had planned to call the lecture “The Other Hobbit”, as Homo floresiensis is commonly known.
But when he approached the Saul Zaentz Company/Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns certain rights in The Hobbit, he was told by their lawyer that “it is not possible for our client to allow generic use of the trade mark HOBBIT.”
“I am very disappointed that we’re forbidden … to use the word ‘Hobbit’ in the title of our proposed free public event … especially since the word ‘Hobbit’ is apparently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (and hence apparently part of our English-speaking vocabulary), the word ‘Hobbit’ (in the Tolkien context) is frequently used with apparent impunity in the written press and reference to ‘Hobbit’ in the fossil context is frequently referred to in the scientific literature (and is even mentioned in Wikipedia on Homo floresiensis). I realise I’m in unfamiliar word proprietry territory (as an earth scientist) … so I’ve gone for the easiest option and simply changed our event title.” said Alloway.
My opinion is that of the io9 writer. (Also, how does using the word in this context depreciate the company’s intellectual property?)
On the one hand, I can see a company that has a trademark interest in the word “hobbit” worrying about that word becoming generic. And Alloway acknowledges that he organized the lecture specifically to coincide with the release of The Hobbit film and capitalize on the name. But Alloway and his fellow scientists are clearly using the word in a different market—scientific, rather than storytelling—and the very fact that they call it “The Other Hobbit” acknowledges Tolkien’s invention of the word.
But regardless of whether the Saul Zaentz Company is legally obligated to protect its trademark interest in the word “hobbit,” it strikes me that this conflict could have had a very simple resolution. The company could have licensed the use of the word to the lecture organizers for a nominal fee. Even without the company’s blessing, however, Homo floresiensis remains a “hobbit” in much scientific literature—and in our hearts.
[LINK] “Archaeologists banned from referring to ancient humanoids as “hobbits””
io9 reported that the company holding intellectual copyright to the term “hobbit”, from Tolkien’s novels, isn’t letting the term be used in connection to human subpsecies Homo floresiensis. See this
Guardian report.Dr Brent Alloway, associate professor at Victoria University, is planning a free lecture next month at which two of the archaeologists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, Professor Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna, will speak about the species. The talk is planned to coincide with the premiere of The Hobbit film, and Alloway had planned to call the lecture “The Other Hobbit”, as Homo floresiensis is commonly known.
But when he approached the Saul Zaentz Company/Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns certain rights in The Hobbit, he was told by their lawyer that “it is not possible for our client to allow generic use of the trade mark HOBBIT.”
“I am very disappointed that we’re forbidden … to use the word ‘Hobbit’ in the title of our proposed free public event … especially since the word ‘Hobbit’ is apparently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (and hence apparently part of our English-speaking vocabulary), the word ‘Hobbit’ (in the Tolkien context) is frequently used with apparent impunity in the written press and reference to ‘Hobbit’ in the fossil context is frequently referred to in the scientific literature (and is even mentioned in Wikipedia on Homo floresiensis). I realise I’m in unfamiliar word proprietry territory (as an earth scientist) … so I’ve gone for the easiest option and simply changed our event title.” said Alloway.
My opinion is that of the io9 writer. (Also, how does using the word in this context depreciate the company’s intellectual property?)
On the one hand, I can see a company that has a trademark interest in the word “hobbit” worrying about that word becoming generic. And Alloway acknowledges that he organized the lecture specifically to coincide with the release of The Hobbit film and capitalize on the name. But Alloway and his fellow scientists are clearly using the word in a different market—scientific, rather than storytelling—and the very fact that they call it “The Other Hobbit” acknowledges Tolkien’s invention of the word.
But regardless of whether the Saul Zaentz Company is legally obligated to protect its trademark interest in the word “hobbit,” it strikes me that this conflict could have had a very simple resolution. The company could have licensed the use of the word to the lecture organizers for a nominal fee. Even without the company’s blessing, however, Homo floresiensis remains a “hobbit” in much scientific literature—and in our hearts.
[LINK] Wilfrid Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Wilfred Owen‘s famous poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920 and found here, expresses my sentiments re: war and the question of how it should be memorialized.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
