Scribbles and Bits

This is a very brief selection from a much larger 1988 book I found in a free box, Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories. It is a life story from a woman involved with Brazilian spiritualism (more specifically, umbanda). The book is still miraculously in print, and there is a screen-readable version for the print-disabled on archive.org.

Citation: Patai, Daphne. “ÂNGELA: ‘In Spiritualism There’s Real Equality.’” In Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories, 109-110, 120-125, 364-365. New Brunswick: Rutgers,1988.

Mori: I done got my periodic need for books about queer ladies, so I have been wallowing in lady books. Here’s what I read!

( queers and ladies from 1980s-1990s )

And now I feel a craving to make a lady zine. I BELIEVE IN ME!

We were trawling the used section of a local bookstore, as we do, when we found a 2016 anthropology book from a uni press about a machi (shaman) of the Machupe in Chile named Francisca Kolipi. The back cover mentions “how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession” and our ears pricked. Multi? Multi? (Or rather, cultural forms of personhood/selfhood that have nothing to do with mainstream America’s presumption of singlethood as the default norm, but that’s a mouthful?) so we flipped through, and how convenient, this was on page 4:

This multitemporality is expressed through machi’s unique ability to share multiple relational and individual personhoods with beings from different worlds and times and through machi’s inherent ambiguity, which allows them to cross boundaries. Like many indigenous people (Oakdale and Course 2014; Strathern 1992), Mapuche persons are multiple. They expand their personhood by incorporating aspects of others in a variety of contexts. At the same time they condense those aspects into a concrete, singular person with a fixed destiny. Machi complicate this process because they are never singular persons. Minimally, those who are machi are double persons: humans permanently inhabited by a machi spirit who preordains them as shamans and shape their everyday lives and actions. By virtue of their shamanic destiny, machi are simultaneously collective ancestral persons and historical individuals whose personhood is embodies in material objects and living entities (Bacigulupo 2010, 2013, 2014). Machi also share this personhood with spirits, animals, and deities in diverse ways during both ordinary and altered states of consciousness. In trance, machi can become multiple beings at once—simultaneously shaman and spirit, human and divine.”

How refreshingly straightforward! For once, I don’t have to wade through a lot of “the individual perceives herself to be” or “she thinks she is,” it’s just a blunt: they are double/collective persons. Sweet!

I bought it for reference. Business expense, baby!

Getting double vaxxed means we spent yesterday on our ass, reading all our backed up library books. So, what’d we read? (Combining with other books we finished a week or so ago.)

( queers and multis and cat people, oh my! )

“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.” —Gayle Rubin, “Of catamites and kings: Reflections on butch, gender, and boundaries,” The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992, pg. 477-478

Rubin was talking about lesbian political fights about trans people and the overlap and boundaries between butch and transsexuality (and there’s LOTS of expressions of what we’d nowadays call trans and gender dysphoria in A Persistent Desire), but I think the same ideas apply to multi/plural/many-selved stuff too. Goodness knows I spent enough time chewing on my arm because I couldn’t figure out how to express a concept without it turning into a hopeless argument over the terms in use. This whole essay has a lot of great quotes (“sexual preference, gender roles, and political stance cannot be equated, and do not directly determine or reflect one another”) and is worth reading.

Also it’s just really nice to see an essay over thirty years old saying “cool your jets about trans people, it’s fine. Your politics will survive.”

Mori wants this book like burning. Too bad used paperbacks start at $100.

While digging through sci-fi library magazine archives, I found an old 2000 magazine that had the very charming short story, "Princess Angelina and the Dragon," by Renee Carter Hall. Since finding copies of that magazine is pretty hard for most people, I emailed the author about it, and she benevolently chose to upload it online for everyone to enjoy! Ain't that nice of her?

I know I got some dragon-smoochers as readers, so please enjoy this cute fractured fairy tale story of dragon smoochery!

Rogan: since we run pluralstories, maybe you wonder what multi media we actually own! So here’s a list. All of these we own at least in part because it gives us happy multi feelings. (And we use the term extremely broadly, encompassing soulbonding, spirit marriage, exploring geographies of story and the imagination, and other stuff.) Things labeled “private print” are things we either printed, folded, and stapled from ebook, or collated and formatted and bound from online posts.

( Read more... )

Mori: man, what a crummy brain day.

Brain: x_x what will you do to nourish me?

Mori: organize magazines at the sci-fi library, of course! What could be more soul-nurturing than that?!

Brain: you’re right, absolutely nothing!

Mori: man, I can’t help but notice how racy these chainmail bikini babes are and how they’re all over the place, even in nonporny things, while the actual porn we buy these days is way, way tamer in their cover art. These old geeks get to have jiggling nipples everywhere while Rogan can barely buy gay porn comics with a shirtless guy on the cover.

Brain: Hmm... could we make a soul-nurturing activity out of this??? @_@

Mori: I want to go through our entire bookshelf for all the nudity and horny covers and then arrange them into real-life bar graphs charting them by year, content, and couplings.

Brain: HUZZAH! That’s the way to use me! I feel better already!

(And then we made photo graphs and photographs.)

Mori: as a reward for getting through some crummy medical shit, I trawled a used book store for lady speculative fiction! (We’ve realized that it’s a lot easier to let ourself buy it with the glee that even if WE don’t enjoy it, the sci-fi library insures OTHERS will! And while the sci-fi library is well-stocked with “traditional” sci-fi publishers, it is really lacking in speculative work for queer and women’s presses and such.) I have taken on three of the four now...

1. “Sultana’s Dream”, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. 1905 Bengali Muslim biting satire about a carless future society where women rule and all the men have to stay indoors and never be perceived by humans outside their servants and immediate family. The edition I had shared the short story and then all the historical, cultural, and personal context as to WHY the story got made, who the author was (a feminist who fought hard for women’s rights in now-Bangladesh) and why it matters. Very historically interesting and edifying! (Also, for real, I do love the fantasy of Garden Future where all roads look like gorgeous garden paths because cars don’t exist and everyone moves by walking or floating helicopter/zeppelin thingies! In 1905, a carless future was imaginable! When the narrator regrets treading on such pretty flowers, another character tells her not to worry, these are special street flowers that can’t be harmed by feet!)


2. Return to Isis, by Jean Stewart. 1992 lesbian separatist post-apocalyptic matriarchy story. Didn’t finish; everyone was just kind of unpleasant to each other, and if you’re going to write evil rapist men, I damn well require you understand how misogynist rape works. (I am probably the equivalent of the lawyer going “ugh” whenever they have to watch a courtroom drama, when it comes to the study of human sexual douchebaggery, though.) First book of five book series; maybe she got better as she went on, but I have other books to read!


3. Madame Aurora, by Sarah Aldridge. 1983 historical novel about two girlfriends in their seventies at the turn of the last century who, struggling with money and disability, decides to set one of them up as a spiritual advisor, and the events that follow. I really enjoyed this one! Old ladies who still bang! Sordid history! Is it psychic or is she just really intuitive? What’s the deal with that scabby old Colonel? Aldridge does a good job, I think, of writing even unpleasant characters with an understanding of why they are how they are. Refreshing!
   

All that remains now is Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn. Forrest is apparently a better mystery writer than sci-fi (and I read one and liked it!) but I am willing to give it a shot and declare it library-worthy if I can’t stand it.

A successful booking!

Mori: I textually transcribed this zine I raved about earlier! It's a mad pride manifesto with influences from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Icarus Project, Inner Family Systems, and anarchist concepts like mutual aid and collective liberation. Its beautiful imperfection means a lot to my hothead self, so here it is!

This zine is anti-authority and anti-medical. You may not want to read it, especially if you're in a place mentally where your brain is causing you a lot of havoc and doesn't seem at all your friend. Paris Williams's Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift In Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis covers some similar territory with more research, page count, and moderation.

Knocking from the Inside: Breaking Free from Mental Imperialism
by Jimmy Dunson

( You have lost your mind? So? There are worse things to lose. You have found the heart and soul of the universe. You simply stopped being the false god to the universe within you, you stopped being the dictator to your differing parts. )