The Male Hysteric

My therapist wanted me to read Andrea Long Chu's Females for a while and on my way to buy it online something totally wacky happened. I stumbled upon a reddit post about this critical review of the book by a trans woman. The review seems pretty typical, praising Chu for being interesting while at the same time critical of her perspectives and cast them as misogynist, absurd, projecting, nonsense, a "harmful" narrative to trans people, and generally un-transfeminist... essentially a pretty shallow reading of it and closely toeing the "party line" of public-facing transgender narrative at the time it was written, back in 2019.

This would all be quite unremarkable, except in the interim, the book critic has since detransitioned, claims he was "immersed in transgender ideology" which encouraged him to transition because of his "autogynephilia" and has even converted to Catholicism. Andrea Long Chu, meanwhile, is still Andrea Long Chu-ing.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki was a book that I had requested from a long libby queue a long time ago, forgot about, and then suddenly I had to read it right away before it disappeared, so it became my book for May. Anyway, I'm going to be square about it -- I was disappointed.

And I think what disappointed me so much is that about the first two thirds of the book were so, so promising, with a slow build about danger and desire for it to just... poof into smoke. I really feel like to get into my problems with this book will require spoiler tags, so here we go.

For a book with so many meditations on desire, particularly female desire, and clear themes of intimacy between two female characters who are very dissatisfied with their male lovers, the gender non-conformity of the main character, and the taboo of it all, it never... went there. And it's not even that it never went there, it read like there was some kind of invisible barrier preventing it from going there, like some kind of Hayes-like code that prevented it from happening. Once it got too close to happening the novel retracted itself into a nice, neat little story with a neat little lesson about wants without transgressing that awful line of... gasp, lesbian desire!

I admittedly didn't read too much about this book before I started and as a digital copy I did not have the blurb easily accessible so I couldn't immediately tell if it was being billed as a 'queer' or 'lesbian' book. I know that after a certain point in the US, books portraying major characters as gay and normal rather than something inherently... transgressive, I guess? became mainstreamed and I was not sure if this shift over ever happened in Japan so I was wondering if maybe I was seeing something like a book that was pre-this-shift. However, that was not what happened. The story saw what could have been and then went, absolutely not, nothing to see here.

It felt like a perfect distillation of what I was talking about to yvannairie a while ago, how straight, canonical couples have no chemistry at all, while implied gay couples have so much because they're not built completely on societal expectations of what a couple should be. Hell, there was even more chemistry between the main character and her older male tip source than her boyfriend, who thank God she at least broke up with, but that none of the chemistry that the main character actually had was ever explored is so bonkers considering the themes in the book. And it's so weird because it's not like there's no sex happening. It's like sex is allowed, as long as it's not actually sexy at all. Ugh.

Anyway. I don't know how much of this was stuff lost in translation, considering the book was originally published in Japanese. But I don't think I could recommend this book, especially to the type of people I know.

I guess I'm feeling kind of gross because I feel like I'm between projects, but not really.

I am Looking At The Novel, being the science fiction novel I've been working on for two years, and think the first few chapters need a heavy revision. So I have been trying to do that, but being on the computer, it's hard, and I'm just... not feeling it? And I'm not sure if I need to pause or need to muscle through it. My insane thought was to make a draft where I just took the passages I really liked, in some kind of opposite kill-your-darlings, and try to weave a narrative through that way, because this piece is really supposed to be running on vibes, so selecting the bestest vibes first from the old draft may be the way to go. Or maybe I should just do normal editing. I don't know. I feel kind of nuts looking at this thing, which is making me wonder if I should just chicken scratch at dirt for a new project that I want to do but isn't formed enough to really start writing.

I also had this insane idea of making a zine of excerpts of notes I've sent to my therapist, which in my case are extremely prolific. I mean it's my writing so I can do what I want with it, right? But as I was starting to compile some stuff it just felt really hard, even if the excerpts I was working with weren't super significant. I was at a local group to write and in the middle of it I was just like, "wow, what the fuck am I doing, this is insane," and had to get up and leave. But maybe it would be worth it to do? I don't know.

There is a zinefest at the end of June so I did want to bring something more substantial than my minizine for trades, but this might... not be it.

Yes I have been reading, no I have not been very good at recording them. So I’m only going to post some short things about each of these.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir was a reread for me, and a part of why it took me so damn long was because I was taking notes. I was also going to go through all the backmatter, but I got distracted, and now I figure that all of this has been delayed enough that I will talk about it anyway. What can I say? It was way better the second time around because I actually knew what was going on. I feel like The Locked Tomb books are the types of books that get better on reread and you might just have to go on vibes through the first read, which may be a flaw or strength, depending on how you read. I’m still going through the GTN read on Frontline Fifth and am going to try to reread Harrow before getting through their HTN read, though I’m unsure if I will do notes on that one, even though it probably needs it more.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was interesting, but also a book that felt like it went on for too long for what it was, though a part of the problem was probably that I borrowed it from the library as an ebook so the return time was very strict. But if you actually pick it up at a library, it’s a very fat volume! I did enjoy it, though. One thing it did was that it was very direct about the casual terror of being a Jew in the old country which is just… when you have the fantasy fairy stories based in Europe is always absent? Reading it was very familiar, like, yes, yes, the horrors, we know the horrors, and then it dawned on me that no, the vast majority of the writers and readers of these kinds of books (maybe not this one, but fairy stories in general) do not. And that realization was kind of upsetting. But this isn’t Novik’s fault.

Dr. No by Percival Everett was… a very silly book. I picked it up at a bookstore because it was on the counter along with the promotional materials for James, which is having a moment right now but I didn’t think was my kind of thing but Dr. No from the summary absolutely did seem like my kind of thing, or at least I was kind of obligated to read it because I’m also writing about people studying math getting into trouble. I guess I had kind of assumed that James was a serious book, and therefore this would be a different book, it was very goofy, and not exactly in a way I was into (I don't read enough spy thrillers to be into a parody of them I think), but it was still a quick read which isn’t something I can say of a lot of the other books I’ve read lately. I’m left wondering if James is also a goofy book. I mean I guess Twain was considered a humorist but I never found him that funny.

So I was starting to make a minizine and it's about making websites and I'm realizing that I should probably have like, my own website, blog, email address on here and it's just making me think... if I put that shit in print... that will mean that I am making a commitment to these usernames, identities, etc? And that just feels... real scary! It's honestly making me wonder if I should change some stuff around. I don't know. I am no good at names, and I don't know what to call myself for this one.

Then again for a little minizine I probably shouldn't be having an existential crisis about it, and because I will have the master copies I should just be able to change the addresses if I really need to update it, right? Ugh.

I may know who I am, but what to call myself is an entirely different question. That one, I don't know. Ugh.

I should probably get into what books I've been reading (I have been reading, just not posting about it), and getting more into The Locked Tomb fandom. And I've found a podcast that did a read on Gideon the Ninth, Frontline Fifth, and they're going to start reading Harrow soon. I have a feeling this is slightly less brainrotting than my usual podcast fare so that's something.

I'm still alive, and stuff has been rough. Hopefully I'll get back to posting here more.

In a fit of astonishingly wasteful spending I'm getting a dedicated digital audio player. I am not sure if I'm going to end up using it... it will either be the best purchase I've made in a while or a terrible waste, but I'm getting one of the cheap ones so it's unlikely to be too terrible if I end up not using it much. Most of the reviews I see of people using them are audiophiles and I'm not sure I can actually discern anything that they're talking about when I'm listening, because I'm usually listening when I'm doing things. However that's kind of the problem, because most audio comes from my phone and the phone is the most distracting and anxiety-inducing thing in my general vicinity, being able to listen to music that's not attached to my phone should be... good? At least I hope. I think if things were going well in the world I would care a lot less about staying off my phone so much but these days you just scroll and something brand new and horrible hits you in the face every few hours. I need to be able to do my job, at least.

So I was reading an interesting discussion started by a user on BlueSky that begins:

Share a thought about writing some may find controversial?

Outliers aside, I think the quality of any text is roughly proportional to the amount of time its author is plugged online, especially in social media.

And goes on to explain some things that I've noticed as well about some recent books, though I'm not really sure I agree with the conclusion. I do think as a society we've been wrestling really hard with what is "real life" and whether or not the online can be considered "real life", and the denial that it is "real life" has actually been to our detriment in many ways when it comes to understanding how our society has gotten to the dark place where it is now.

I think maybe more of the problem than what this user is saying, rather than that these people lack experience outside of online forums -- maybe they do, or maybe they don't, I don't actually think that's the issue -- is that they are no longer keeping these behaviors siloed to online forums, which is a different matter. I think there is very much a faux pas of bringing the online into real life that is breaking down and some people are more comfortable with it and some people find it "cringe", to use an online word, while others who have never been very online have no idea what is going on because they have no idea the depths of depravity that the first two have experienced. I think in a lot of these cases these people are writing to a microculture, which would be fine, but maybe they don't understand how big or how small this microculture is because the internet has a way of obscuring numbers of these very basic things. The experience of not knowing how many people you are talking to would be rich to plunge the depths of, but it's kind of ignored... because we don't know, and there's a profit/political motive to keep us from knowing, in the form of bots.



But there's also the factor that due to the idea of these norms being siloed and their breakdown is that it kind of seems like maybe these writers do not know how to code-switch, or, possibly moreso, even think that code-switching is somehow immoral. If you read enough books and you read enough fanfiction, you begin to see that the way these two types of prose are written is slightly different, that they exist in different registers, and when you read an original novel that was previously fanfiction with the "fan" part scrubbed off, the register still remains and it's obvious to anyone familiar with it. Blogging is not the same type of writing as what you read in a novel, or what you read in a nonfiction book, either. Posting adeptly on a microblogging site is its own skill, and arguing online is yet another, though one of debatable value. And yet there are many writers who seem to be unable to switch between these forms of writing, and as this OP says, all their writing sounds like you're reading screeds from their blogs. Rather than respecting these different forms of writing as their own art forms, being able to change how you write from one form of media to another becomes dishonest.

And I think this might really be the crux of the matter. So much of this is about how annoyed even queer readers are that certain writers will transplant up-to-the-second overly-online queer microdiscourse into novels set three hundred years ago, or on another planet, or in an alternate universe inhabited strictly with fairies and unicorns. It doesn't make any sense, it destroys suspension of disbelief, and makes the story more difficult to read. However, the writer probably feels that to not include this would be dishonest, somehow, or otherwise morally bad. The piece is meant to be instructive, or an honest display of themselves and their writing identity, or something, meaning that the code-switch cannot happen. The friction between the two sets of norms cannot be smoothed out.

So I guess what I'm saying is that to navigate this skillfully in the way the OP thinks is better, one has to be, in online parlance, a norm-understander, at the very least, rather than it having to do specifically with how terminally online one is. I mean, I guess being terminally online does erode one's ability to understand outside norms, or people who are terminally online generally did not have a great understanding of outside norms to begin with, but I don't think it's quite as one-to-one as suggested.

I don't know, it's hard to formulate all of my thoughts on this. There's a lot. It's getting late.

I don't know if this is an insane thing to do but I updated a fanfic that I wrote two chapters of 3 years ago and then abandoned.

Saboteur, Chapter 3

It's a fic that takes place immediately after the events of S1 and is heavily focused on Viktor, Jayce, and Mel. The thing is that, well, the second season was kind of a clusterfuck of characterization (though it does definitely have its moments) so in a way this looks like a fix fic, except I didn't even know what was broken before I started. Either way, if you're interested, it does include Jayce/Viktor as a ship.

So, summary:

Sky's dead, Viktor's dying, and Jayce is out of commission. With Hextech possibly dead in the water and war on the horizon, perhaps it's time to take a look at who benefits.

Takes place just after events at the end of of S1.