Messiaen = Prog ov the GodZoR
Ligeti = lame after he found fame (eg by the 80s)
Penderecki = mark-down Lutoslawski = Radiohead for strings
Ligeti and Penderecki hold a special place in my heart, prolly ’cos I’m an uncouth sod who don’t know music good — proper music, I mean, and I feel dead ignorant and embarrassed if I’m ever in a room with people talking up the category: 20th Century Composers Who Rate. Buuut … Ligeti, yeah, some of his stuff pinged me right, and same with Penderecki. I don’t have the education to appreciate, say, Messiaen, I mean, a lot of composers (or any other ‘canon’, theatre, art, opera, etc) don’t really open themselves up until you know a heap about what they’re saying, their context, the decades or centuries-long conversations (arguments) different composers and genres have with each other, so my first response to music is very emotional. Penderecki hit that. The strings in Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima or the whistling in St Luke Passion (I’m naming obvious ones here ’cos like I said, going deep in Western Classical music has never been easy for me), these, the sound, the emotion, I want to be buried in that. (Radiohead though, gotta say, fuck that basic noise.)
A couple of years ago, I was at a conference in Berlin, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. The last speaker was this trans woman punk from Italy, whose proposal for some kind of anarchist feminist utopia included slamming Islam and conflating it with terrorism.
This was followed by question time, which was kinda awkward ’cos everyone heard what she said and I was sitting there cursing and fucking under my breath. So I got up and returned the slamming. To which she replied with, “Oh, I was talking about ISIS, not all Muslims.” More muttering from me to those I was sitting with, “Nah, you said Islam, we all heard you, we know what you mean, and I’m not touching that reply of yours.”
After the conference, a friend of Ms. V.’s came up to me, he said, “Have you seen The Taqwacores?”
It’s the last Friday of Ramadan. A month ago I had no intention of doing this. The Friday evening before Ramadan started, I had a chat with myself, something like, “Just do the first day, you don’t have to do the whole month, just the first day.” “Awww but Sahūr, Frances, it’s at 230am, and Iftar’s at 930pm.” “Ok, so just have breakfast when you usually do, and then go till İftar.” “But that’s not Ramadan.” Can you hear me whining? I was whining. “You do what you can, that’s all. If that’s what you can do, even if only for one day, that’s what you do for that one day.” “But—” “Just one day, babe, just the first day, just for your Gran, that’s all.”
One day turned into another, into a week, into two, into a month. And here I am at the last Friday of Ramadan. Still here, still doing what I can.
This isn’t a post about why I do Ramadan, or how I do or don’t justify not doing it strictly — which for some is the same as not doing it at all. I know why I do it, just as we all have our personal reasons for doing it. I know who I am and where I come from.
Islam is a fucking surrender.
That’s it.
Knowing that you don’t run the show, staying mindful of it in everything you do.
Take your hands off the wheel. See how it feels.
Islam isn’t about ayats and hadiths, and niches, and lamps.
It’s about us. All of us.
Allah’s too big and too open for my Islam to be small and closed.
I’m so Muslim. I am so Muslim.
I can say fuck Islam.
You know Imam Husain said,
“He has no religion, let him at least be free in his present life.”
Let’s pray.
It’s that time of year again! Frances’ and supernaut’s Books of the Year for the 9th time. And some most excellent books were read indeed. This time last year, I realised I’d been struggling a bit with enjoying reading. I looked back over what I’d read in previous years, compared it with 2015’s crop, and noticed I’d dug myself into a bit of a hole with mediæval art and history.
What to do, Frances? I dunno, Other Frances, how about read about space travel and stuff? Good idea!
Unlike last year, my ninth iteration of looking back on a year’s reading — and it’s in October because that’s when I first started blogging about reading, almost a decade ago — has some absolute slammers on the fiction side. Last year I didn’t even name a fiction book of the year. This year, if it wasn’t for one in particular, there’s be 4 or 5 smashing at it for joint Book. And in non-fiction the situation’s pretty similar, or even better, cos there’s barely a single non-fiction work I’ve read in the past 12 months that was anything less than well awesome. It’s also one of my least-read years, only 29 that I read and blogged (possibly a couple of others I’ve forgotten); definitely plenty of internet — I mean Rainbow Autobahn distraction in the last year, exacerbating my inability to focus on pages. I blamed my poor reading last year on that distraction as well, probably time to harden the fuck up and put away the internet.
Of those 29, only 10 were non-fiction; the remaining 19 non-fiction skewed more to fantasy than sci-fi, with around 7 works explicitly skiffy, 9 explicitly fantasy, and a trio (maybe more depending on how dogmatically I apply those categories) deftly straddling both. I call those Speculative Fuckery, ’cos I love when the only two genres I read start boning each other.
On the non-fiction side, mediæval Northern European history continues filling my shelves, and there’s a bunch of “not easily categorised on their own” which nevertheless fit predictably into my decades-long interests.
Then there’s the new, or maybe to say newly clarified bunch that I kinda want to call Islamicate Studies, though that might miss something, so it encompasses that, human rights, identity, philosophy, feminism, and is primarily from women from and/or writing on Iran, Near/Middle East (I’m a bit iffy on this appellation right now, and have been trying out ‘West Asia’ also because it shifts the centre and subject of focus out of Europe, dunno though), and people from or descended from those regions in Europe, North America, Australia. I arrived at this field of interconnected subjects after increasing dissatisfaction with how feminist/queer/left-ist writing addressed brown and/or Muslim identities; regarded these people living in Europe, North America, Australia; and when I spent some time thinking about how the diverse subjects I was reading needed to come together. Also it’s a lot of living in Berlin/Germany/Europe and getting increasingly pissed at the racism against anyone not unequivocally ethnically correct, and the white feminist/queer/left-ist bullshit distractions, and my own personal, slow movement towards identifying if not myself as Turkish/brown/West Asian/Muslim, then definitely my family history (as you can see from all the slashes, I have no idea).
Books! I have read them!
Fiction first. This was a fine year. If I hadn’t read Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, she’d still be my Fiction Book of the Year with The Winged Histories, though sharing with a few others. I don’t actually know how I would pick a book of the year from a pile comprised of that plus Jo Walton’s Necessity and The Philosopher Kings; Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng’s The Sea Is Ours; and Ann Leckie’s masterful finish to her debut Imperial Radch trilogy, Ancillary Mercy. Impossible. I would probably give it to the latter, but then … Necessity, a brilliant conclusion to another trilogy, and The Winged Histories: sublime. So I could possibly get it down to a trio of exceptional literature, but no further. Lucky then A Stranger in Orlondria saved me from that anguish.
I don’t want to say it’s ‘better’ any of those other three — though perhaps that’s the case when comparing it to The Winged Histories, which would lose its spot in the trio just as The Philosopher Kings does to Necessity. I think of the two Samatar has written it’s a more major work. If this is my final trio then, I’m not claiming one is better than another, simply A Stranger in Olondria has had a significant effect on me. Would that effect stand up under re-reading? How would that re-reading compare to one of Leckie’s trilogy? If I read them both back-to-back, what then would be my judgement? The best questions always involve more reading.
This is all anyway just writing from memory, how I remember a book made me feel. I’ve been thinking recently that eventually my memory of a book dissolves until it’s just feelings, colours, a glimpse of an image or two. It’s like sediment, like geology, layers upon layers of this.
Breed was a romp of Oglaf proportions and probably the most fun I had this year. I wish she’d write more of this. Reynolds’ Revelation Space I read because I needed some hard operatic space sci-fi, and his Slow Bullets novella was a favourite of mine last year. This one was good enough for me to slog through the whole, uneven trilogy. I like him, but there’s a hopelessness in his work, like the heat death of the universe.
As with Reynolds, Genevieve Cogman is another whose previous works got me to read her latest. The Invisible Library, which I also read last year was well tasty. I was super excited to find she had this sequel — and OMG! Just like last time when I discovered The Masked City, she has a sequel to that! Excellent! The immediate result of me writing about my favourite books is I’m ordering more.
Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning. Yeah, loved a lot. Glorious cover art, almost almost one of my first choices, but a few flaws in it, and the cliffhanger “Will bad things happen? Stay tuned for Book 2!” guaranteed to piss me right off. Please, don’t do that to me. I’ve paid for a story, not half a story. If your story’s too big for one book, then at least divide it in a way that doesn’t leave me hanging.
All of these authors I’ll read again (along with a score of others on my Have You Written A New Book Yet? list). I might be a bit crabby here and there about the works, but I also possess a modicum of self-awareness that I’m a pretty fucking demanding reader. The authors and works above if you’re into sci-fi / fantasy (or if you’re not) are about as good as it gets. Not just for this year, but of everything I’ve read in the last 12 years or so. (And just wait for next year’s Books of the Decade! It’s gonna be hectic!)
Non-fiction!
I didn’t read much of this in the last year, but I lucked out here too, barely a dud among them (and that single one was an old book I realised I’d never finished), running out of superlatives here.
Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, in no small part for her writing on the Soviet occupation and war in Afghanistan. Her writing is chilling. Heart-rending. I even said Zinky Boys would be my Book of the Year. Pretty sure I said the same thing about Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others. In truth I shouldn’t pick one over the other, except that Babayan and Najmabadi’s Islamicate Sexualities somehow is tying all this together, mediæval history, human rights, feminism, identity, migration, religion, and it’s so urgently pertinent to the slow stumbling back to the abyss Europe is currently taking. Read them all, or at least familiarise yourself with the writers.
And that’s my reading for the last 12 months. As if I’m not sated and replete already, I’ve already got a pile of new stuff.
Reading is a great privilege. It’s not however, explicitly a human right. Article 26 i. and 27 i. of the UN Declaration of Human Rights either directly imply or by extrapolation intend reading as a human right, yet nowhere is it explicitly stated that reading comprehension or literacy, and the opportunity to gain this ability is a right. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, yet I can interpret the UNDHR in a way that fulfils the letter of declaration while still populating my dictatorship with illiterate proles.
My ability to read, at the level I do, at the frequency, my ability to critically consider the works I read (with or without concomitant swearing), to write about them here, to discuss them with others, all this is a privilege. And I mean that in the sense of a special honour. And that necessitates obligation.
Buy books! Buy books for your friends! Encourage people to read. If you know someone who Can’t Read Good (And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too), help them, reading is only difficult if you’ve been told it is. Support your local libraries!
And:
So here’s to the writers, and their publishers and proofreaders and editors and typesetters and designers and artists and agents and friends and families who make it possible for them to write so that I may read.
Sofia Samatar — A Stranger in Olondria
China Miéville — The Last Days of New Paris
Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi (Eds.) — Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire
Miri Rubin — Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures
Charlie Jane Anders — All the Birds in the Sky
Jo Walton — Necessity
Jaymee Goh, Joyce Chng (eds.) — The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia
Charles Stross — The Nightmare Stacks
Gude Suckale-Redlefsen — Mauritius Der heilige Mohr / The Black Saint Maurice
N. K. Jemisin — The Fifth Season
Sofia Samatar — The Winged Histories
Jo Walton — What Makes This Book So Great
Ada Palmer — Too Like the Lightning
David Nicholas — The Northern Lands: Germanic Europe, c.1270-c.1500
Alastair Reynolds — Absolution Gap
Julie Phillips — James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Kecia Ali — Sexual Ethics in Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence
Seyla Benhabib — The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens
China Miéville — This Census-Taker
Alastair Reynolds — Redemption Ark
Alastair Reynolds — Revelation Space
Genevieve Cogman — The Masked City
C. A. Higgins — Lightless
Jo Walton — The Philosopher Kings
Emma Newman — Planetfall
Svetlana Alexievich — Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War
Amy Shira Teitel — Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA
Afsaneh Najmabadi is one of my favourite writers. My first encounter with her was two years ago with Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. 2013 Book of the Year for me. That same year, she published Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran, which I read last year. Book of the Year again. Obviously I’d have Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by her and Kathryn Babayan, at the top of my reading list. It’s been on my shelf a few weeks now, one of that pile I collected when I sold off the bollocks. I started it a couple of times, got diverted into other books, made a diligent foray into the first part over breakfast and you wanna talk about books you can’t put down? This is it.
I was rewriting my biography last week, amazing how many hours can be spent on 240 words. I realised that it’s been a while since Central Asia, specifically Afghanistan, has been one of the foci of my studies. China’s still there, mediæval northern European / germanic history has sprung from nowhere to rout swathes of interests, as has Islamic history.
A big one right there, “Islamic History”. What does that even mean? Well, my interests in China did and do have a component that’s concerned with the borders, not China proper, occupied China, whatever we might agree in the future is the term for Tibet, Xinjiang, even the provinces like Guangdong and others, which could be regarded as discrete countries, and in that Islam plays a role, either in Xinjiang as the eastern-most region of Central Asia, or in Guangdong as the port on trade routes that saw significant Muslim presence. Then there’s my Central Asian / Afghanistan interest, obviously Islamic (as well as Buddhist and others), which in the past few years has slid more consciously over into an interest in Iran, thanks in no small amount to Najmabadi. And then there’s whatever is in Berlin, which reaches out to Germany, and across Europe. A history of any of these is inextricable from a history of people who also happened to be Muslim, whether immigrants, descendants of immigrants, or locals (not sure how long you have to be a descendant for before you’re a local; that’s the conversation we’re having right now).
So I’m vaguely defining my current interests and studies as Northern European & Germanic mediæval, Islamic, and Chinese history, with an emphasis on women’s roles and representation. Which sounds like a whole tanker of “What the Fuck?” but if there’s one thing I do even if I don’t consciously trust my doing, it’s have seemingly wildly divergent interests that are in actual fact deeply intertwined. (And yes, my love of hoonage is not incommensurable with this.) And it’s people like Najmabadi and books like Islamicate Sexualities that help me understand this.
And what a book. If the quality of a book can be measured by the number of works mentioned which go onto my Must Buy! Ned Cash 4 Bookz list, this one will bankrupt me.
I was watching the première of Pitch on the weekend. It’s a Fox TV series about a young black woman who becomes the first woman to play for a Major League baseball team; a serious drama marketing campaign equivalent of the “You Never Lamb Alone” ad (“What’s the best thing about diversity? Everything!”). I have zero interest in baseball, but there I was watching it when for a split second the camera cuts to close-up pan the grandstands and it’s totally “What’s the best thing about diversity? Everything!” cos there’s a woman standing wearing a long white hijab in a crowd that’s multicultural as fuck. I don’t know if this is representative of an average baseball crowd, my feeling (informed only by unintentional slopping around the edges of US sports culture) is that American baseball has one of the whiter sports audiences, not NASCAR, but over that end of the spectrum. What that image is about is desire — even if it’s primarily driven by marketing and money. In combination with casting a black woman as a rookie Major League player, it says, “We see you and we want you here.” And again, even if this is cravenly driven by money, we see ourselves in this and once we are visible, we can decide how to interpret our image. And if we don’t see ourselves, we’re nothing.
And how, Frances, does this relate to Islamicate Sexualities? Same weekend, watching the second episode of High Maintenance where the first story is about a young South Asian student living in Brooklyn with her religious aunt and uncle, negotiating that while wanting to get blazed on the roof. The first essay, also the introduction goes between Orientalism, homo-nationalism, queer colonialism, mediæval history, post-colonial theory, to sketch out a broad proposal for how we might talk about sexualities, and by extension identities, for people living in and coming from Islamicate regions, cultures, and/or backgrounds. And talking about ourselves, not being talked about.
Somewhere recently I said I was only interested in reading works coming from this perspective, that the issues and questions around desire, identity, self and community would only find partial, incomplete answers in feminism/queer/whatever we’re currently calling it that was located within an Anglo-Euro-American (throw in Australasian) historical frame of reference, a reference that’s inherently white. Or to put it another way, we’re not going to find an answer to colonialism from colonialists. This is something I think has become unambiguous from living in Europe and Germany, where not only is there an unwillingness to regard immigrants of how ever many generations distant as ‘German’, we’re not even at the point of admitting this a fundamental problem. My reading of works like Katherine Pratt Ewing’s Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin, and Ruth Mandel’s Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany played a big part in beginning to understand this and formulate my thinking, as did more recently Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. I’m reading writers like these substantially because they’re the only ones prepared to address these issues.
Islamicate Sexualities was published in 2008, emerging from a seminar held in 2003. That’s a generation, a lifetime ago, the seminar a few months older than 4Chan; the book barely younger than tumblr. Yeah, I’m talking about 4Chan and tumblr. If you want to understand how transgender/transsexual/trans people (I mean trans women here) and identities came over the last few years (call it a decade) to where they are now, places like these (along with LiveJournal, and probably MySpace, but that’s all been lost) are critical. And how fast this is moving means a book like this is going to miss a huge part of the conversation as much as it retroactively informs and predicts. (And as for why our part of the conversation is only recently tipped the queer/cool meter, that’s the history of Anglo-Euro-American feminism/queer right there.) I’ve barely read the first part, so I’m not pre-emptively criticising it here, just pointing out its age, how things have changed in eight years, and what that might mean for a prospective reader.
Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi (Eds.) — Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire
Books! Yes! Panda acquired quite some for me — and snuck a head into shot looking well smug. “Pands, how did you afford so many new books?” “Well, Xiao Fang, I sold 50 of your old ones.” Dead clever is Panda.
Wotchagot then? From left to right:
What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Fantasy and SF by Jo Walton
The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia edited by Jaymee Goh, Joyce Chng
Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures by Miri Rubin
Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe by Caroline Walker Bynum
Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi
The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art edited by Beate Fricke and Urte Krass
Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr / The Black Saint Maurice by Gude Suckale-Redlefsen
And not making it in cos I forgot cos I’ve already read them:
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
Fifty out for ten in. Plus a few extra euros. Bargain! And how good is that list? Jo Walton again! Caroline Walker Bynum again! Afsahneh Najmabadi again! Saint Mauritius! Mediæval Art! Science-Fiction! It’s a pity that my remaining books, now filling three entire bookshelves, are entirely too good to sell, otherwise I’d be repeating this and polishing off my wish list (it’s been sitting at around 110 books for a couple of years). It’s a fukken library in here.
Probably Twitter is where I first saw Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics in Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, and a few months ago at that, before this revised edition was published. Probably it was also mentioned on one of the Middle East / Central Asia / Feminist blogs I read; things I’m interested in tend to circulate unconnected across multiple disciplines and fields, the same names coming up like ear worms. So onto my reading list it went, and being read it is.
Mid-late last year—October-ish, when I do my annual Books of the Year—I realised I was frustrated with my reading, and looking at previous years when I was mad-thrilled about far too many books, realised also I needed to diversify. That has been partly turning my euros towards—and here I get caught in words I’m not so fond of, so caveats ahoy—feminist-ish, Middle-East-ish, philosophy/ethics/human rights mashed with a secular-ish Islamic frame of reference, plus migrant perspective also.
I have a tendency to define things from the negatory: not this, not that. Yeah, so what? It helps elucidate what this or that is by shaving off what isn’t, often because I can’t say or don’t know what a thing is until I’m partially clear on what it’s not. So what I was not looking for was primarily yet another voice coming from white, Anglo-Euro-American culture. I’ve read enough feminism from that dominant perspective already, and part of that negatory process of mine is divining what’s being missed, not talked about, ignored, excluded. It’s a pretty simple and dumb method, and works for me.
That negatory resolved into a clear delineation of what I did want to read: it’s kinda, “What if Hannah Arendt was a secular Muslim (Turkish, Middle Eastern, Persian, you get the picture) in the 21st century, what would she write?” I dunno, probably something along the lines of Seyla Benhabib, Ruth Mandel, Katherine Pratt Ewing, Afsaneh Najmabadi, or Kecia Ali.
Let’s just say there’s some fully awesome women writing on these interconnected subjects, and Kecia Ali is one of them. And like black/brown, trans women feminism coming out of Anglo-American locations, it’s where the real hard work is being done. Compared to Seyla Benhabib, Sexual Ethics in Islam is light reading, which is not to say it’s not demanding and well-researched, just that Benhabib is more like ploughing through The Life of the Mind, and Ali I can read over breakfast without my brain leaking. Too much.
I’m about halfway through, so against my desire to write about why I’m reading a particular book rather than review it, this is slipping between the two. This far through, it’s pretty clear that Islam is unsalvageable. Just like Christianity. Unsurprising when they both share the same Abrahamic root, so could roll Judaism into that as well. It’s unsalvageable because either you’re a literalist or you’re a contextualist; you can’t be both, but that’s precisely what people in those religions try to do. There’s no way around God hates fags, women, and quite a few other things. So if you’re looking to resolve that in Islam or Christianity, it requires entering the realm of contextual interpretation—as well as historical revisionism, because whatever queer or homo is in the 21st century is substantially incomprehensible in medieval religion. It’s this approach also that’s seen by literalists and fundamentalists as ‘picking and choosing’ from the infallible divine word, and more or less defines the opposing sides in what Islam will become.
Mediæval history is full of extremely intelligent logical philosophers, of whom perhaps I could say their prime concern is internal consistency. This applies as much to Islamic theologians as it does to Christianity, centuries-long impenetrable debates that were as much political as they were religious. In Islam, or rather the medieval Islamic jurisprudence I’ve brushed upon, I often find a logical extrapolation that is either well-buried or not explicitly stated in Christianity, it’s a thinking through the implications of a statement, often well outside what empirical knowledge can deliver. While Ali isn’t proposing a manifesto for an Islamic reform, what she does do is work through these debates and decrees, point out their inconsistencies, and point out how they can be reconciled with a 21st century Islam.
One of the things I was thinking about early on in reading was how this book is contingent on 20th century history. The secular nationalist projects of the early years of the century in Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere, the post-war decolonising of Africa and the Middle East, all propose a different path for Islam than we currently have if these same countries hadn’t been the sites of West-East proxy wars and meddling. What kind of book would Sexual Ethics and Islam be if the 1979 revolution in Iran hadn’t happened, and the invasion of Afghanistan, if the 1950s and ’60s revolutions and coups hadn’t happened, or hadn’t become military dictatorships, if the 21st century ‘International Community’ hadn’t been so hungry for invasion and war across the Middle East and North Africa? Would it have even needed to be written? Would it have been only of academic or sociological interest? Or is it that anyway? Is the Islam that’s lived far more a secular, contextual experience than it’s possible to apprehend or understand while Anglo-Euro-American islamophobia and racism remains ascendant?
One thing that is missing though, and for which I’m pretty cynical about, is trans people—particularly trans women—in Islam. Ali mostly subsumes trans identities under homosexual/queer sexuality (when they’re mentioned at all, which is not bloody often) in the chapter “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Same-Sex Intimacy in Islam”. In itself that’s fine, considering the issues—legal, social, medical, religious—which determine the lives of people whose sexuality isn’t narrowly directed into normative roles affect trans people equally as they do lgbt/queer/non-straight people—and let’s dispense with glossing over trans lgbt/queer/non-straight people being a thing too. As well, she originally wrote the book some ten years ago, when cis feminists could easily get away ignoring trans issues with no repercussions. Now it’s all Tranny-Tipping Point (thanks tumblr, 4chan, and Twitter!) so there’s gotta be at least the effort made to lip service, tokenism, ‘intersectionality’. Yeah, pretty disappointed here on this one.
Najmabadi wrote a whole book on transsexuality in Iran—two if you count some of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards as well as Professing Selves; Kohmeini’s Fatwas from 1963 on intersex people and 1987 on transsexual people is still remarkable (as I’ve said before, I’m using transsexual specifically to differentiate from umbrella transgender/trans/trans* cos I think if we’re gonna appellation everything, then there’s a need for a term under that umbrella for trans people who go down the ‘transitioning’/‘gender confirmation’ path, with all the institutional legal and medical processes that involves); there’s ample evidence in mediæval Islamic thought and writings that people who were somehow not categorisable as unequivocally male or female were a thing, and that Islam had far less of a problem with this than Christianity, more than enough that a whole new chapter on this would be more than appropriate. Nope. Disappointed. Really a missed opportunity there.
As a kind of muslim/non-muslim/wtf I don’t know … what happens when a parent is Muslim or was the child of Muslims, but raises their child without this ever being mentioned? Sure, you’re not brought up Muslim, but how much of the parent and grandparent’s experiences slips over? Not having a Halal kitchen is something a person who has never had anything to do with Islam has ever thought, “fark, that’s ruined it for the grandparents.” Anyway as an I don’t know with Muslim ancestors who is dead curious about that side of my family, I keep thinking of my grandmother while reading this. Also would recommend over any of the other books I’ve mentioned because it’s a much easier read, and far broader in scope, one of those fundamental texts, even if you read nothing else on Islam, there’s enough nuance, depth, scholarship here to actually understand the issues and what’s at stake.
Kecia Ali — Sexual Ethics in Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence
The Pergamonmuseum’s Wie die islamische Kunst nach Berlin kam (How Islamic art came to Berlin) was not one of their huge endeavours. Sprinkled through the permanent collection on the second floor to celebrate the 150th birthday of Friedrich Sarre were objects, photographs, and documentation he’d collected from across the Levant, Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, with influences from even further east, Indian and Chinese aesthetics in Islamic, Arabian, and Persian art. Sarre was responsible for the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum’s Islamic collection, the museum which became the Bode-Museum and part of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. So, not a full exhibition; one of their many mini-exhibitions that rotate a small selection of their hundreds of thousands of objects through public display every year. And a good reason to buy a Jahreskarte.
I was there under the misguided belief there’d be plenty of Osman Hamdi Bey, one of my favourite artists of the late-19th century, who’d totally be filed under Orientalism if he was Christian European. He’s not, and there was only one work of his, Der persische Teppichhändler, which started the exhibition proper after the procession of Sarre’s photographs up both sides of the stairs. I would have bought the exhibition book for those alone if it was cheaper.
I’ve been through part of the Pergamonmuseum before, and I ended up photographing a lot of the same pieces. They appealed to me then, and they appeal now. Many of the bowls are profoundly beautiful; photographs can’t capture the deep lustre, the layers of glazing, the way the light moves through this. Also the turquoise prayer alcove (image numbers 34-39), which I discovered a way of convincing my camera to see somewhat as my eye does. Still nothing like seeing its massiveness before you, the colours shifting, it’s a lot less reflective than the photos imply, some of the closeups give a better sense of the intensity of the glaze. I also love that every time I’ve seen this piece, there’s a group of people sitting in awe before it. Perhaps it was only this visit, but there were a lot of Muslim people wandering through, which made me think the museum is doing something right.
There’s two rooms, about two-thirds of the way through which are devoted to works on paper. This time it was some of Sarre’s own collection, Persian and Indian miniatures, particularly ones which explored European influences in works from these regions, and in Mughal art. A couple of examples of this, (images 48 and 49) were on display, as well as beautiful calligraphy of Bismala in the form of a bird on gilt paper, and another calligraphy in the form of a Mevlevi Dervish.
All this sits on the unhappy mound of colonialism, despoiling of archaeology sites, quite a bit of European racism, of which Sarre and Bey were on both sides of. When I was in Dahlem Museum (before I got into my over-enthusiastic museum blogging), I was looking at all the works from Dunhuang Mogao Caves and elsewhere in what’s now Xinjiang and Gansu pilfered by Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Albert von Le Coq and others. As much as the robbing of cultural history is unequivocally a crime, it’s certain little would have survived the 20th century of China’s Cultural Revolution. Of course some of that in turn got destroyed when Germany went all Nazi on Europe and Berlin got its teeth kicked in, so the argument goes back and forth. I’m not even sure how much value as works of art these things would have if it wasn’t for the idea of European archaeology and the monetary value that gives things lying buried for hundreds or thousands of years. We are however over a hundred years into museuming the fuck out of humanity’s history, so having these objects in museums is probably preferable, or at least inevitable, even if that means being buried once more, this time in the archives.
Later I discovered I’d never visited an entire wing or more of the Pergamonmuseum. I think I need to buy a Jahreskarte again. In the meantime, sixty images of works from Museum für Islamische Kunst or İslam Eserleri Müzesi or متحف الفن الإسلامي or موزه هنر اسلامی or Museum for Islamic Art.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 1: Astrolab des Muhammad Zamān al-Mašḥadī. Iran, 2.H. 17. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 2: Astrolab des Muhammad Zamān al-Mašḥadī. Iran, 2.H. 17. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 3: Osman Hamdi Bey: Der persische Teppichhändler. 1888
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 4: Osman Hamdi Bey: Der persische Teppichhändler. 1888 (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 5: Osman Hamdi Bey: Der persische Teppichhändler. 1888 (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 6: Osman Hamdi Bey: Der persische Teppichhändler. 1888 (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 7: Osman Hamdi Bey: Der persische Teppichhändler. 1888 (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 8: Wandmalerei einer Frauenfigur in einer Nische. Jordanien (Quṣair ʿAmra), 1. Hälfte 8. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 9: Wandmalerei einer Frauenfigur in einer Nische. Jordanien (Quṣair ʿAmra), 1. Hälfte 8. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 10: Teller mit stilisiertem Vogel, der als eine Darstellung des Sternbildes Schwan interpretiert kann. Irdenware. Samarra, 9. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 11: Schale mit Schrift. Neben der Randbemalung bildet das zweimal in schöner Kalligrafie geschriebene arabische Wort ‘baraka’ (Segen) den einzigen Schmuck. Irdenware. Irak, 9. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 12: Schale mit stilisierter Pflanze. Irdenware. Irak, 9. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 13: Flacher Teller mit Flecken- und Ritzdekor. Gefunden im großen Kalifenpalast. Irdenware. China, 9. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 15: Elfenbeinkasten mit figürlichem Dekor. Unteritalien oder Sizilien, 11. – 12. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 16: Elfenbeinkasten mit figürlichem Dekor. Unteritalien oder Sizilien, 11. – 12. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 17: Elfenbeinkasten mit figürlichem Dekor. Sizilien (?), 13. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 18: Elfenbeinkasten mit figürlichem Dekor. Sizilien (?), 13. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 19: Elfenbeinkasten mit figürlichem Dekor. Sizilien (?), 13. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 20: Schale mit Vogelpaar, in der Leibern die Segensformel “Baraka” im Kūfī-Duktus. Irdenware. Iran (Nīšāpūr), 11. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 21: Tasse mit arabischer Inschrift: “Hüte dich vor dem Verlangen!” Irdenware. Usbekistan (Samarkand) oder Iran (Nīšāpūr), 10. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 22: Schale mit kalligraphische vollendeter Inschrift im Kūfī-Duktus. Irdenware. Usbekistan (Samarkand), 9. – 10. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 23: Schüssel mit arabischem Schriftdekor im Kūfī-Duktus “Der Freie ist frei, selbst wenn ihn ein Verlust trifft. Viel Glück!” Irdenware. Usbekistan (Samarkand) oder Iran (Nīšāpūr), 10. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 24: Schüssel mit arabischem Schriftdekor im Kūfī-Duktus “Der Freie ist frei, selbst wenn ihn ein Verlust trifft. Viel Glück!” Irdenware. Usbekistan (Samarkand) oder Iran (Nīšāpūr), 10. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 25: Achteckige Platte mit Senmurv, einem Mischwesen aus der altiranischen Mythologie. Silber. Iran, 10. – 11. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 26: Weibliche Figur in höfischer Kleidung und Schmuck, aus einer Gruppenkomposition. Stuck. Iran, um 1200
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 27: Zierkrug mit Reiterfriesen und Fabelwesen. Quarzfritte-Keramik. Iran (Kāšān), 13. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 28: Schale. Quarzfritte-Keramik. Iran (Rayy oder Kāšān), Ende 12. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 29: Kleiner Zierteller mit kurviger Kontur. Nach dem Vorbild chinesischer Tang-Keramik. Quarzfritte-Keramik. Iran (Kāšān), 11. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 30: Sechseckfliese mit arabischer Inschrift im Kūfī-Duktus. Stuck. Iran, 12. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 31: Gebetsnische mit reliefierten Arabesken und Koraninschriften im Kūfī-Duktus. Quarzkeramik. Iran (Kāšān), dat. Letzte (Dekade) des Ṣafar 623 H. (21.1. – 1.3.1226)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 32: Bauteil mit Teil einer Künstlerinschrift. Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), um 1242/43
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 33: Lautenspieler. Marmorrelief. Zentraltürkei, 1. Hälfte 13. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 34: Gebetsnische mit Thronvers (Koran, Sure 2, Vers 255). Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), 3. Viertel 13. Jh. Aus der Beyhekim Moschee (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 35: Gebetsnische mit Thronvers (Koran, Sure 2, Vers 255). Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), 3. Viertel 13. Jh. Aus der Beyhekim Moschee (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 36: Gebetsnische mit Thronvers (Koran, Sure 2, Vers 255). Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), 3. Viertel 13. Jh. Aus der Beyhekim Moschee (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 37: Gebetsnische mit Thronvers (Koran, Sure 2, Vers 255). Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), 3. Viertel 13. Jh. Aus der Beyhekim Moschee (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 38: Gebetsnische mit Thronvers (Koran, Sure 2, Vers 255). Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), 3. Viertel 13. Jh. Aus der Beyhekim Moschee
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 39: Gebetsnische mit Thronvers (Koran, Sure 2, Vers 255). Fayencemosaik. Türkei (Konya), 3. Viertel 13. Jh. Aus der Beyhekim Moschee (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 40: Gebetsteppich mit Brunnen- und Baummotiv. Ägypten (Kairo), Anfang 16. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 41: Gebetsteppich mit Brunnen- und Baummotiv. Ägypten (Kairo), Anfang 16. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 42: Sternfliese mit persischen Versen im Nasḫī-Duktus. Quarzkeramik. Iran (Kāšān), dat. Ṣafar 739 (August/September 1338)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 43: Schale mit radialem Streifendekor. Quarzfritte-Keramik. Iran, 12. – 13. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 44: Teller mit singendem Vogel. Quarzfritte-Keramik. Iran, Afghanistan oder Mittelasien, 15. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 45: Teller mit singendem Vogel. Quarzfritte-Keramik. Iran, Afghanistan oder Mittelasien, 15. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 46: Riza Abbasi: “Schahzadeh Muhammad Beg aus Georgien”, um 1620-23. Aus einem Album von Antoine-Louis de Polier (1741-95)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 47: “Kampf zwischen zwei Dromedaren”. Iran, 1600-1650
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 48: Balchand: “Madonna”, seitenverkehrt nach einem Stich von Julius Goltzius (gest. c. 1595) oder Hieronymus Wierix (1553-1619). Indien (Moghul oder Dekhan), 1650-1700
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 49: “Madonna und Kind”, nach einem Stich von Johannes Wierix (1549 – ca. 1618). Aus einem Album des Prinzen Salim, dem späteren Moghulherrscher Dschahangir (1569-1627). Indien (Moghul), um 1600
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 50: Einzelblatt aus einer Handschrift “Yusuf und Zalikha” von Dschami. Herat oder Buchara, 1583
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 51: Zierseite mit persischen Gedichten und Randmalerei im Moghulstil. Indien, c. 1630-50
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 52: Linkes Eröffnungsblatt (’Unwan) der Handschrift
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 53: Zierseite mit Eröffnungssure (Fathiha) des Koran und persischenVersen von Sa’di. Iran, letztes Drittel 16. Jh. Randergänzungen Indien, frühes 17. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 54: Silbergesprenkeltes Blatt mit persischen Texten und Versen, in verschiedenen Richtungen im Schikaste-Diktus beschrieben. Iran, 18. Jh. Bordüre Moghul-Indien, 18. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 55: Silbergesprenkeltes Blatt mit persischen Texten und Versen, in verschiedenen Richtungen im Schikaste-Diktus beschrieben. Iran, 18. Jh. Bordüre Moghul-Indien, 18. Jh. (detail)
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 56: Kalligraphie mit der Basmala in Form eines Vogel. Iran, ende 17. Jh. oder später
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 57: Kalligraphie in Form eines Mevlevi-Derwisches. Türkei, Ende 19. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 58: Großes Keramikgefäß in Form einer stillenden Mutter. Iran (Kaschan), erste Hälfte 13. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 59: Vier kleine Sternfliesen. Iran (Kashan), 14. Jh.
Pergamonmuseum Museum für Islamische Kunst — 60: Zwei Keramikpapageien. Iran, 18. Jh.
It turns out I’ve been blogging about reading for around 2/3 the age of supernaut. It still feels like something I’ve only recently begun. This year I’d taken a slight pause from my intense reading bouts, so in part this is a reminder of what I read in the last 12 months, that I was reading, and what I thought then and now.
Yes, I’ve read less than last year, 40-ish books compared to last year’s 54-ish. This has been obvious to me in recent months with my pile being added to but not depleted, not so much reading as chiseling away. Anyway, no more blathering. The books:
The non-fiction, serious stuff:
Half of what I read was superb. When I was performing in Parsifal, I got to read William Kinderman’s Wagner’s Parsifal, a glorious book, which made me love and appreciate the opera even more. I paired that with Dayal Patterson’s equally magnificent Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the genre, and it supplied me with a mass of new listening. It was on my Book of the Year list until shunted off by a couple of exceptional works. Michel Serres’s was not one of those, but Variations on the Body is a beautiful, poetic work by one of Europe’s most profound and little-read philosophers, who understands corporeality in a way largely lacking in western philosophy.
Adam Minter writing on the recycling business in Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade is a book I’d recommend to pretty much anyone (being aware that much of what I read falls into the WTF? category), and he’s a rare, smart writer on the subject, presenting it in a way non-specialists can understand and enjoy, also a needed critical voice in the global trash industry and China’s role in it.
Another from China: Frank Dikötter is one of my favourite writers on 20th century China, and I’d been waiting for The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957. I’d been interested in this period because of stories a friend in Guangzhou would tell me about her Tujia grandparents holding out for years in the mountains against Communists. I’d also been waiting for Liao Yiwu’s prison years autobiography, available in German for a year, For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey through a Chinese Prison System. There is hype around post-’89 Chinese writers, particularly the Beijing and Shanghai urban youth genre. I’ve yet to find a writer of that generation as good as Liao, and as necessary to read. All of his works are unparalleled documentaries.
Finally, there was Julia Serano, her sequel to Whipping Girl: Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. It’s odd to leave this off the Book of the Year list, as it’s undeniably a critical work and Serano is up with bell hooks and Judith Butler (among others) for her writing on feminism, trans, and queer politics and culture. She needs to be read; buy it and read it.
The reason why Serano got bumped is Afsaneh Najmabadi, whose Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity was one of my Books of the Year last year. I heard about Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran late last year and waited months for it. Considering the amount of attention works on trans people (particularly trans women) received in the last year, it’s baffling that Najmabadi goes largely unmentioned. For those engaged in this subject with no interest in Iran specifically, her documenting of the influence in Iran of Euro-Anglo-American ebbs and flows of political, social, medical, legal thought and practice on trans issues and identities is sufficient to make this required reading. Iran though is the dog that’s beaten irrespective of context, and successive Ayatollahs since the ’70s issuing Fatawa recognising trans people as legitimate and in need of help is presented in the west rather as the despotic Islamic dictatorship forcing sex reassignment on unwilling gays and lesbians. As with Excluded, buy it and read it.
Then there was H. Jay Melosh’s Planetary Surface Processes, which Emily Lakdawalla wrote about on The Planetary Society. Along with last year’s Colliding Continents: A Geological Exploration of the Himalaya, Karakoram, & Tibet, this one fills my need to look at massive contusions of granite and other rock. There’s a moderate number of formulae, and regular plunges into elucidations of those, placing this somewhere in general university-level and reference book. It is specific and not a casual read, and it’s the one book you want on the subject. Sometime soon I’ll pair it with one on planetary chemistry.
And finally for the non-fiction is Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, recommended by a friend, and just one of those delightful, dense, heavy, demanding works written by someone so phenomenally talented and capable, and who simply loves her work. Completely a joy!
The fiction, also serious stuff:
I read less fiction in the last year, and tried new authors, some of whom I absolutely loved and are firmly helping me get over the absence of Iain Banks. Others … others who everything indicates I should love instead leave me cold, or worse, finding them actually not very good.
Let’s dispense with The Water Margin first. The second volume of five of John Dent-Young and Alan Dent-Young’s translation of Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong: The Tiger Killers: Part Two of the Marshes of Mount Liang. This has to go on my list similarly as I have to have breakfast. Even if I read a hundred superior books, it would still be here. Some books are like that, you may never read them but they’re always around. The Water Margin is—as I keep saying—China’s Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, or Marlowe’s riotous plays. I’d compare it to Shakespeare but it’s not equivalent: it’s bawdy, rough, uncouth characters and stories, and the writing itself is nearer the former two. Given its miraculous ability for genius turns of phrase, it’s perhaps comparable to Shakespeare for his wordsmithery. The Dent-Young’s translation is my favourite of the lot also, though the price per volume certainly isn’t.
Then there’s Ysabeau S. Wilce, who I discovered mid-this year, ordered the first of the Flora Segunda trilogy, promptly ordered the other two when barely past the first chapter. Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. Yes, that’s the title. Children’s book indeed. Would that some of the adult authors I read be capable of imagining and telling a story as this. I loved all three, though the first the most. It seems to me in trilogies where the protagonist starts almost from nothing, that the first part establishes the significant growth, and the remaining two are more working with what they’ve already learnt (the Matrix and Star Wars trilogies, for example), and it may be unreasonable to be irritated by this, but it does—books two and three are still wonderful and had I only read either of them I’d be frothing as I do over book one. It’s not in the same league as the two big ones below, but I did love the world and characters.
Another new author was K. J. Parker, who has written quite a bit. It was The Folding Knife that piqued my interest, and I enjoyed it enough that it gets a second mention here.
I almost forgot Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, neither sci-fi nor fantasy, something of an autobiography, a little like reading my own life, rough, punk and trouble. The ending I hated, but the rest, she deserves awards for this and to be read a fuck-ton load.
The two big ones then, and colossal they are.
One the Skiffy side, channelling Iain M. Banks: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice; and on the Mediæval Fiction side (I keep imagining her and Caroline Walker Bynum together in a bar): Nicola Griffith’s Hild.
Buy these books. Read these books. These are incomparably the best sci-fi/fantasy of 2014. If you’re swayed by other’s opinions, between them, they’ve won or been nominated for more awards than I have fingers and toes. Both of them have my favourite covers of the year. Honestly, if you don’t like either you should give up reading; books are wasted on you.
I cannot say enough good things about either of these two books and their authors. It’s an extraordinary time for sci-fi and fantasy with writers like Griffith and Leckie. It’s unlikely I’ll ever have an experience like my reintroduction to sci-fi via Iain Banks a few years ago, but to utterly give myself over to the author and story as with these two and to be rewarded for that is beyond compare.
An aside: you may notice that many of the writers are female. It’s intentional. A while ago, I decided to put my money where my feminist mouth is. This is easier in fiction because the two genres I read, sci-fi and fantasy have many talented female writers and the genres are going through a renaissance due to these and non-white, non-western, non-straight authors (and a definite shift by the publishing industry to promote them). It’s brilliant. In non-fiction, it’s not so easy. In part this is because I want to read particular authors; in part particular subjects that are dominated by white male authors in the english language sphere. I consciously balance these two biases by seeking out and selecting female authors, and when it comes to a choice I’ll put the female author first. The result of my extraordinary and hegemonic discrimination is that the first twenty books on my wish list are split almost 50/50 between male and female authors.
There follows two salient points: first, on any subject or genre, despite their being anywhere from an abundance of quality women writers all the way down to an equal number as there are men, by comparison it requires sustained effort to find them. Secondly, women writers—or at least the ones I read—tend to take for granted aspects of society that male writers mostly consider irrelevant. (This is my “Easy A vs. Superbad” theory.) Not only do women authors tend to not make assumptions based on contemporary, western ideas of gender, desire, ethnicity in society, they also regard these subjects as self-evidently present even if not immediately obvious and therefore critical to a proper understanding of the subject (or, as my wont, deserving of entire books on their own). Male writers on the other hand far too often see the world in terms of a narrow heterosexual and mono-cultural construction where men are doing all the important stuff.
This to me is the fundamental point in arguing for proper representation: it is simply not possible to otherwise understand a subject or imagine a world. And given that there has been prolonged underrepresentation, it follows that what is claimed to known on a subject can be reasonably said to be seriously lacking at best and likely suspect unless it can demonstrate adequate representation.
Another year done, then. More shelves filled. More new, superb authors whom I’m able to enjoy because of the fortunate combination of being able to read, living somewhere I can make time to read, and where books are affordable and commonplace. So (as I said last year) here’s to the writers, and their publishers and proofreaders and editors and typesetters and designers and artists and agents and friends and families who make it possible for them to write so that I may read.
William Kinderman — Wagner’s Parsifal
Dayal Patterson — Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult
Michel Serres — Variations on the Body (trans. Randolph Burks)
Adam Minter — Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade
Frank Dikötter — The Tragedy of Liberation
Liao Yiwu — For a Song and a Hundred Songs
Julia Serano — Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive
Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran
H. Jay Melosh — Planetary Surface Processes
Caroline Walker Bynum — Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond
Shi Nai’an, Luo Guanzhong — The Tiger Killers: Part Two of the Marshes of Mount Liang (trans. John Dent-Young, Alan Dent-Young)
Ysabeau S. Wilce — Flora Segunda
Ysabeau S. Wilce — Flora’s Dare
Ysabeau S. Wilce – Flora’s Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light
