Keep it moving

Thursday, 12 December 2019

Caution: miscellany ahead!

I’m wanting to return to my mythography series, but I wish I had more ready to say by this point! Somehow, I’ve gotten lost before the first item of the outline I set out for myself. I felt that I couldn’t start writing about Naïr’s Until the Lions until I read through John D. Smith’s abridged translation of The Mahābhārata as a kind of ready-to-hand symbol of the “authoritative text,” against which to compare (and better appreciate) just what kind of radical things Naïr is doing.

But then I thought, I need more cultural context in general, so I continued my Wendy Doniger kick, and I’ve been chipping away at her The Hindus: An Alternative History. I’m at the part about Mohenjo-Daro and the height of the IVC (Indus Valley Civilisation), so I’ve made it to ~2000 BCE.

But I was noticing something about my reading in relationship to this planned blog series. I found myself wanting to occupy a kind of didactic mode—which is absurd, considering that I’m not an Indologist or Sanskritist, just a lay-person with an interest in Vedic and Post-Vedic lit! Granted, it’s less that I want to claim knowledge and more that I want to show my having learned, modeling it, with some signposts, if it’s an interest readers share.

My interest in this makes sense to me, but I’m also finding myself wanting to contextualise it within the scope and trajectory of the blog, especially since I’m also starting to notice what people read and share. My most read-entries are about reading Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death, translated by Don Mee Choi, The Book of Sand by Ariana Reines, and Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future (although of course each of these posts brings in other sources), and the post before this, which wasn’t really about reading at all, but which was instead an airing out of some of my feelings about formal education and publishing.

Which is to say, that if I was trying to have a catch clicks (and presumably readers) I’d think about what it was those four posts have in common. But in the meantime, I still want to track my actual reading habits (which I think will also take some of the internal pressure off the sheer absurdity of performing sudden miraculous expertise about a canon I am really only beginning to read).

So…what have I been reading?

Lots of social media posts, which, whatever the content, always make me super anxious! But bookwise:

As mentioned above, Naïr’s Until the Lions, which led to Smith’s abridged Mahābhārata, which led to Doniger’s The Hindus.

But also:

I started reading Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume 2—I’ve loved him since The Golden Compass and I have a standing watching date going for His Dark Materials with my partner and a friend of ours. Haven’t gotten in very far. Lyra in college, at odds with Pan (her daemon)—ack!

Books I’ve had close at hand because I’m working with them: Samuel Ace’s two new books, a few other Belladonna* books, like Positions of the Sun, and Theory, a Sunday.

I’ve had Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing out, and Call Me Zebra, because these are two books that I’ve taught in private workshops, and I’m doing some writing about producing an autodidact mystique. I don’t currently have copies, but I also have Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (no, not related to the movie) and di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman mentally close by for similar reasons. The TLDR version of what I’m calling “autodidact mystique” is this: School has a mythology which, at this point, is self-renewing. Movies, books, and other media depict and idealize the formal education experience.

So in contrast, I’m thinking about characters like Zebra from Call Me Zebra, and Sibylla and Ludo from The Last Samurai—how they perform this almost overwhelming aptitude and desire for learning, but in a slant, extra-institutional or anti-institutional way.

Am I ever going to be half the polyglot that any of the above characters are? I have doubts! But do I use their zeal as inspiration and their capabilities as a goal? Yes!

I realized recently that that’s part of why I wanted to share Call Me Zebra, because in addition to being part of the canons of exile and refugee lit (and noteworthy for its contributions to those canons), Zebra teaches us how to be a fierce autodidact. Obviously, I’m not advocating uncritical emulation! I’m more after the autodidact spirit, which I’m realizing is actually a set of behaviors and beliefs that can be learned and developed over time. Qualities like (offhand): willpower, dedication, resilience, resistance, rebellion, radicalism, vision.

I’ve also been enjoying Dexter Palmer’s Version Control, sci fi with its near- or alt-contemporary setting. It seems to be about social media, empire, marriage, grief, and time travel (that is “causality violation”). Recommended to me by Kelly Link at the fabulous new BookMoon in Easthampton!

Also also: I started in on An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, a present from a friend, so we can talk about what’s doing in utopias. Maybe we’ll have the seed conversation that sparks this change that energizes that tendency and so on and so forth until the current state withers away (a girl can dream)!

Also also also: I’ve been starting to read some of the work in NECK 2, which I picked up when I was last at Wolfman in Oakland, on the strength of its design and TOC. Come to find out, this journal is out of Marfa, and Tim Johnson & Caitlin Murrary, to whom a pre-transition barrista version of myself served coffee, are credited in the notes for helping with the printing. Isn’t it just the smallest world?