Media Wednesday is a chonky catch-up.

books

Towards the middle of last month, I suddenly got into the idea of completing a reading bingo card from the r/Fantasy community. I had almost all the squares filled just with things I'd happened to read, but I needed "Superheroes". At the same time, I wanted to participate in the Trans Rights Readathon. I ended up starting and throwing away about three or four trans superhero stories. It's grim out there.

The Meister of Decimen City, Brenna Raney (2023). This book is about Rex, a supergenius and sometime supervillain; she neither understands nor accepts the traditional narratives about who gets to be a hero and what makes a villain. Her personal life, both past and present, is as chaotic as her alignment, but when she comes under government supervision after one too many mistakes (her cloned super-intelligent dinosaurs got loose and rampaged, it was a whole thing), she slowly starts figuring things out -- about herself, her past trauma, and where she's going from here. I loved this book; its pacing is brisk, its characterization deft, and it's very, very funny as well as endearing. Written with a whole lot of affection for the ridiculousness of superhero conventions, it also takes seriously questions about the little people, the bystanders and victims who *don't* get stories told. There is nuanced, believable treatment of what can be clumsy subjects, including asexuality, PTSD and autism, that remains grounded in the characters' experiences and perspectives. And throughout the main story, her dinosaurs continue to grow up and get more and more intelligent, and I love them all so much.

I'm Afraid of Men, Vivek Shraya (2018). This blew me away. Shraya deftly laces together memoir, narrative voices and grounded theory as she examines just how much what we think is masculinity is founded on, depends on, domination, violence, and exploitation.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1885). Despite *a lot* of factors, including my father teaching this novel and taking us more than once to visit Twain's home, I'd never read it; I did read Tom Sawyer for school and really disliked it, but loved Connecticut Yankee. Anyway! I decided to read this finally both to close the gap in knowledge and as preparation for reading Percival Everett's just-published James.

Difficult as it is to read something superficially so deeply racist, I loved it -- the dry, dry irony; the trembling polarities of right/wrong, black/white, man/woman, land/water, master/servant, noble/commoner, light/dark; Huck's instinctive ethics founded on empathy; Jim's stoicism (and its failures); and the constant sense that everything is at play, in suspension, under creation (and therefore subject to revision and innovation) -- all the way up to the last section (the Evasion). There, all the delicacy of humor and irony get trashed in favour of broad minstrelsy that returns Jim to the status of object. What Tom does is horrifically cruel and senseless.

online reads

“The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart.” On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution. This is very, very bad.

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I don't particularly care for Brandon Taylor's fiction and I find his online persona deeply obnoxious, yet I continue to subscribe to his newsletter as a sort of loathe-read (not quite hate but definitely not positive). Last fall, he mentioned writing a big piece on Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart, which is what spurred me to tackle the series. He published the essay a week or so ago; I'm linking it along with his first critical piece on Zola: zola was kind of a zaddy, no?: millennials are so into zola right now (2021) and Is it even good?: Brandon Taylor reads Zola. I'm glad he discusses the determinism in Zola's naturalism, if only because that's the factor that put me off in the abstract (actually reading the novels resolved that problem). Anyway.

Rather like Taylor, Lauren Oyler is a terminally-online millennial writer with a pretty inflated sense of self-importance that, combined with the affectation of enervated cynicism favoured by terminally-online millennials, makes for unpleasant, unenlightening reading. Ann Manov's review of Oyler's essay collection -- Star Struck: Lauren Oyler’s meditations on Goodreads, anxiety, and gossip -- is fantastic. With unerring focus and clear, vivid prose, she demonstrates the laziness, both intellectual and creative, of such attitudes.

In response to that review, and others, Oyler did a chummy, stomach-churning little chat for Interview magazine: Lauren Oyler Wishes You’d Fact-Check Your Reviews. She's absolutely insufferable, as a person(a) but, more importantly, as someone who thinks she's a critic. Of reviewers' reactions to the "elitism" paragraph (in which she concludes a takedown of Goodreads reviewers by "confessing" she's an elitist), she lets slip an assumption that made me get up and pace the room: "It’s also just funny to trick people into embarrassing themselves. Maybe some of them watch more TV than others, but we all more or less went to Ivy League schools, so it’s not exactly a scandal. But I do think it has something to do with my tone, which I have thought a lot about and will not be changing. There’s this ironic voice that I use sometimes that allows me to say, 'Isn’t it funny I went to an Ivy League school?' And I think that’s disarming, because you’re not actually supposed to say that, right?"

I loved Manov on precisely this issue: "Having been a teaching assistant in the department Oyler is so proud to have matriculated at, I am familiar with the less-than-Herculean intellectual labors needed to get an English degree from Yale. But I digress." I just can't imagine being more than three, maybe five, years out of undergrad and still THAT impressed with where my 18-year-old self got into college. People who talk about where they went -- whether here, as an attempt at humour, or in professed ~concern about what others might think of them -- are just so unbearable. She's operating in circles where such things remain important, where she assumes everyone has the same background, and all of that makes it more than easy to dismiss whatever she has to say. Anyone that incurious and self-satisfied and proud of such homogeneity isn't worth reading.

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For some reason, I am strangely fascinated by the development of cozy fantasy as a thing. I don't like any that I've read but the discourse is both compelling and deeply irritating. I think I'm interested in large part not because the genre is suddenly dominant, but because how we talk about genres and their qualities can reveal so much about what we want and expect and *assume* is true of the literary landscape. Reading posts in r/CozyFantasy is like doing real-time discourse analysis, where recs are contested because a book might mention war or sex or something else NOT COZY and therefore the entire work is deemed un-cozy.

Here are some recent pieces on the phenomenon:

• Considering the cosy turn in SFF: who gets to be comforted? I'm not really sure what Bourke is trying to say in this piece; if anything, she just seems to be setting out various terms. The question in the title isn't raised until the penultimate paragraph and never actually addressed.
• On Cozy SFF by forestofglory. Talks about valuing domestic labour, but that really isn't something I see in the works of this subgenre -- which seem to be much more interested in the appeal of small-business ownership for some reason.
• 3 things: dune 2, long weekend blahs, cozy vs. grimdark sff: a reaction post to the previous essay. The opposition of "cozy" to "grimdark" just feels like an update on hopepunk vs grimdark, which doesn't (for me) get at the attraction readers seem to feel for the genre.