everyone is asking me to be less freud-pilled

[recognito]

Really thought I'd be able to crack to the end of Nixon Agonistes this month, but the penultimate section is boring/infuriating/disturbing (analyzing liberalism through Woodrow Wilson’s interventionist international policy and then applying it to the Vietnam War) and getting through the whiplash of “man woodrow SUCKS. nixon SUCKS” to “the vietnam war was fucking awful and fuck the western world forever” took me a solid two weeks.

I did finish a few other books, ordered, as always, by enjoyment. I'll plan on reviewing Metaphor: Refantazio for next month, since I've enjoyed it a lot and it has some stuff to chew on thematically.

The Silent Woman, Malcolm - Yes, we are still in a state of Malcolmania, no, I will not stop until I'm out of books... 

Before finishing The Silent Woman, I committed the sin of looking at the Goodreads page for The Journalist and the Murderer and found exactly the kind of bizarro reviews you'd expect, including one that was bummed out that there was not more uncertainty, process, and vulnerability... I do think Malcolm is VERY concerned about process (narrated interviews, descriptions of chasing people down, extended consideration of the journalistic encounter) and vulnerability (understandably, still bruised by the lawsuit)... I guess the typical approach to The Journalist and the Murderer would have been to locate uncertainty in the murders themselves, but Malcolm's conclusions re: the murders is "he was found guilty, there's some uncertainty about process but not much and also if he didn't do it I'd be surprised" and her uncertainty rests in the ethics of journalism, but in a way that does not jibe with ethics as many readers understand it. Malcolm's concerns about ethics deal very little with shame or goodness... something about the way that nonfiction metabolizes guilt and accountability ends up vapidly self-absorbed, overly concerned with the question of, "am I good? is what I'm doing right? would I be found good and righteous in the eyes of my community?" -- just boring, dogshit handwringing that ultimately demands comfort and validation/justification instead of going, "well anyway having thought about all this, I will continue interviewing people and ruining their lives for the story. I can live with it. see you in the next book."

Putting aside last month's book, The Silent Woman investigates the relationship between Sylvia Plath's literary estate--during the time of her writing, controlled by Plath's ex-husband and his sister, Ted and Olwyn Hughes--and Plath's biographers. Malcolm's entry into this world comes from a then-recently published biography, Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson, a former classmate at the University of Michigan. The biography was received poorly by just about everyone but, in Malcolm's eyes, Bitter Fame is "the most intelligent and only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies ... written to date."

As with The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm's fascinated by the ethical complications: the biographer is, in her words, "like the professional burglar" and motivated by "voyeurism and busybodyism," the urge which also "impel[s]" the audience; these same impulses are "obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity;" the journalism (especially knowing her works appeared in the New Yorker) crossover is more or less self-evident. The biographer is free to burgle and represent the dead however they like, while the living have legal protections against libel and can speak back. The myth of Sylvia Plath lives on, fixed by her death; Ted Hughes is part of this myth but remains alive, at once the unhappy participant within the story and the hyper-scrutinized guardian of her letters.

Right away, Malcolm confesses she's far more sympathetic to the Hughes than she is to Plath. The charm is not physical, though Ted Hughes' physical attractiveness is something emphatically noticed by Plath and everyone Malcolm talks to; Malcolm never gets a chance to meet Hughes himself, only dealing with his sister, Olwyn, the executor of Plath's estate.

Although Malcolm's on "his" side, she doesn't comes off as overly harsh towards Plath. As she points out, she and Plath were born within two years of one another, giving her firsthand knowledge of the environment that nurtured Plath and the shock and surprise of the Ariel poems given the repressive environment of the fifties. Malcolm reads Plath's poetry, stories, letters, and journals with her usual top notch literary skills. I've seen some people talking about Malcolm's sympathies as though they're ruinous to how we should understand Plath, but uh I guess I don't think it's too partial. Sure. Maybe I'll read another Plath biography later and see where I land. 

I found myself both interested and a little frustrated by Malcolm's reflections on correspondence, publication of letters, motives for publications of unflattering letters, what makes a biography interesting, and more. I keep thinking about what Malcolm writes about the subject's motive to speak with a journalist: fame, etc., the opportunity to set the record straight, and so on. A biography, however, offers a different set of opportunities, to assert one's importance as a witness or a character... and at this point I realized that the Internet has changed the way we think of correspondence and journals/blogs/letters and how we make judgments on the character of strangers. The voyeurism remains--except now you don't need to be dead to be burgled, and you don't even need a biographer, just a few obsessives on the internet.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book quite a lot. Very different stakes and tenor than her other books, but still as sharply reasoned and canny as ever. 

 

What My Bones Know, Foo - I will admit that part of my reluctance to enjoy this book is shaped by the way it was recommended to me, which went along the lines of, "Do you think Chinese American childhoods inevitably produce C-PTSD? I'm processing my diagnosis, and I think you can, too." With a start like that, I think it's a miracle I didn't hate this. 

A short summary: Foo receives a diagnosis of C-PTSD from her therapist after working together for 8 plus years. Foo thought she had already processed her wildly emotionally and physically abusive childhood, but receiving the diagnosis sends her spiraling in a new, unexpected way. She quits her job, decides she has to find a new therapist, and spends months learning more about C-PTSD and trying new ways of managing her triggers and mental health.

One thing that really stood out to me is how her background in radio helped her with her current therapist... They record her sessions, Foo transcribes and uploads the transcripts to Google Docs, and afterwards, they ANNOTATE THE TRANSCRIPT TOGETHER? The chills this gave me...

My sense of radio producers is that they're great at prioritizing narrative and clarity for a general audience, understand how to seem personable and friendly, and are good at selecting details, and Foo uses these strengths well. The work's power is in Foo's earnest and clear recounting of her emotional and therapeutic journey. It's meant to be a a helpful resource, and... you know I think I need to accept that this is a genre of book that people read for its orthopedic qualities and not because they want prose that goes beyond competent. 

Be warned, the descriptions of her childhood abuse are genuinely horrifying. I'm so, so, so relieved she has a much happier life now.

 

Scattered All Over the Earth, Tawada - This is the one novel I finished this month, and it turned out to be book one of three... come on! 

I've wanted to read Tawada for a while ever since I read an excerpt of one of her short stories in an article about strange and surreal fiction, but had trouble finding her works in English until recently.  Her works are often described as "strange" and "surreal" and even perverse in their set ups. I found this to be relatively straightforward novel, notable mostly for its upbeat tone, rotating POV, and the shameless arrangement of convergences/coincidences... Its premise is very funny: Japan, as a country, has disappeared and is remembered primarily as the land of sushi. Hiruko, stranded in Europe, invents a new language, Panska (pan-Scandinavian), and is looking for another native speaker of Japanese. 

While reading Scattered All Over the Earth, I couldn't help but think of how distinct and different Tawada's approach to language and mother tongue is from the contemporary American discourse. Tawada lives in Germany and writes in German and Japanese; she wrote this particular novel in Japanese. Hiruko's quest for another native speaker is thwarted in comedic ways: first by an Eskimo man who's mistaken for being Japanese and eventually decides he likes the identity he gets to inhabit through this mistake and learns Japanese through textbooks, and the second by a Japanese man who has lost the ability to speak altogether.

The conventional treatment in an American novel would be one of outrage or indignation, I think, over imposters, the crimes of fakeness, and probably include an extended section on authenticity. Not to sound bitchy but I can think of two or three Asian American authors who make this their whole beat, and lol it's fucking boring. My suspicion is that for me, a self-identified bad Chinese American, language comes married together with a sense of inadequacy, and the idea that a "real, native speaker" who has lost her country and only has the language would be happy to see this imposter and feel relieved to speak with someone even if they talk like a textbook would seem, well, strange, surreal, or even perverse. After all, if there's a real, authentic article walking about, why does that not kill the imposter, the one who can only speak in awkward textbook phrases? Why is this imposter not punished or shunned but instead welcomed and embraced?! It's a weirdly visceral urge: growing up, my lack of fluency in Chinese was something often I felt punished for or deserving of it, from all sides... having met more people, I've realized this urge is actually not universally held. As always, my book blog is the space for me to sweatily process my childhood. Stephanie Foo, are you there?? 

It's not that I think Tawada is totally uninterested in this idea of the real--there's a pretty odd section about robots, sexuality, and telling lies, along with an interest in recreations and retellings--but the animating impulses of the novel are uninterested in dwelling in this unproductive mode of right/wrong. The characters are highly mobile in interests and life paths; they're restless, willing, and not prone to despair or outrage. I enjoyed the tone and attitude of this novel quite a bit, for the most part.

There's one thing that really put me off: a character is introduced as a trans woman in her own POV, but the second we step out of her POV, no one else manages to put the clues together and just goes on treating her like a crossdresser... Given the novel's approach to mistaken identity, learning languages, and easy acceptance of people, this feels like jskdfh a massive awkward beat and I'm not sure if it's going to be addressed in future works or if I want to wait for another book for Tawada to make a more definitive statement on her identity. No idea if I'll finish out this series. 

As a note I'm also reading Han Kang's Greek Lessons right now, too, with a similar interest in language and loss of language/speech--undoubtedly, it'll turn out quite differently but looking forward to doing another comp/contrast.

 

Girlhood, Febos - an essay collection covering, you guessed it. Girlhood!

Less glibly, the essay collection is more accurately a series of essays centering the female experience with pervasive sexual aggression, control, and violation. The strengths and weaknesses are in its clear cut and consistent depiction of how gender, sexuality, and violence work. This is one of those works that some people will find revelatory and really connect with... as for me, I think didn't really need to read this...

 
Separate from any specific book, I've been thinking about what makes Freudian/psychoanalytical reads so compelling to me when so much discussion around therapy and mental health basically feels like a minor form of torment. I cannot deny that part of what I enjoy is that Freud and psychoanalysis are highly literary (analysis of spoken word, body language, the slippery relationship/transference between analyst and analysand) and esoteric--not just in terms of being specialized, but also in terms of the clear distinction between those in the Know and the Foolish Outsiders who know only the corrupted, twisted versions of Freud. I love feeling like I'm one of those striving for secret knowledge.

Psychoanalytical reads, in the right hands, feel surprisingly accepting of even severe personal faults... maybe it's the current mode in popular discussion around mental health, which inevitably have a moralizing quality (YOU NEED TO BE GOOD! WORK HARDER! JUST KEEP TRYING!!!!) and express a need for a hygienic relationship between victim, violence, and violator. Public discourse will always seek to clearly define acceptable/unacceptable behavior and purge the unacceptable. once the conversation around mental health became more broadly popular, it inevitably took on the sadism built into the public discourse. Obviously this is not to say that there are not psychoanalytic reads that are not also secretly bloodthirsty or attempting to shoehorn a false interpretation onto a situation--famously, it can produce reads that no one asked for and shot through with all of the faults we expect from a reading originating in an early twentieth century European man and then kept in vogue by Americans who charged the big bucks. But the chief thing I get out of the vocabulary and tools is a better sense of how identities/consciousnesses are not discrete entities bound by arbitrary ties that can be broken off at any time and set free but interpenetrated by the consciousnesses of others, some beloved and many beloathed, and the way we invest our identities into people and movements. It's also useful to me to set aside questions of, well, blame and focus on instead describing what I see before me, neatly validating impulses and thoughts and annoyances I already had. Yippie!

Psychoanalytical reads do make me think of what types of conclusions I can draw using different modes of thinking... kind of an obvious thing to realize but I've been pretty dissatisfied with some common types of literary logic and patterns and part of the dissatisfaction is like, wow, yeah, the master's tools! our complicity! upholding the status quo! the problem is systemic! we can change it if we divest! I mean, where do you even begin: the lens, the metaphor, the logic of the marketplace infiltrating into a novel, a medium about human feeling and living and words? So I'm drawn to psychoanalytical thinking because it reminds me that I got myself into the writer problem by being a guy who doesn't know shit about human beings and knowing more only got me deeper into it.

if I can pull it off, next month will have a triple feature: one post for video games/movies, one post for the month's read, and a year's end book post, where I evaluate my reading goals and announce, to my audience of at least four people, my ambitions for next year's reading list... until then, book hos