This Week’s Culture Round-up

Before we get to the epic barbarian art and horror movie posters, I thought I’d start with some serious links about writing.

Although I enjoy a bit of writing (as my several blogs attest), I’m not sure that I’d like to do it professionally, but for those of you who do have such ambitions, via @HarriKay on twitter we have Chuck Wendig’s, 25 Things I Want to say to So-called Aspiring Writers ; and, via @memories_child, here’s an interesting article about creative non-fiction, truth and fact checking: Facts are Stupid

For the feminists among you, Stavvers has a series of posts critiquing Catherine Hakim’s book Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital starting here.

For those of you interested in the history of sexuality, here’s an article in the Huffington Post from Hanne Blank on Uncovering the History of Heterosexuality, via @SonofBaldwin.

Stale Popcorn revisits the film Mommie Dearest which is something of a cult favourite among gay men.  A few years ago I worked in an office where all my colleagues were gay men and did occasionally wonder why they used to shout “No wire hangers, ever!” at each other – because of this movie apparently.

From Madam Guillotine, a post about the reinterpretation of Irene Adler in recent takes on Sherlock Holmes The Case of the Sudden Femme Fatale, found via Bad Reputation on twitter.

From This Ain’t Livin’ I Hate You Stephen Moffat.  I’m afraid I gave up on Dr Who at the beginning of the last series.

But there’s a new feminist Dr Who blog in town: Doctor Her which is much needed I think, considering all the feminist discussion we’ve seen about the show recently.

Well, this is depressing, 15 minutes of Worf’s ideas getting shot down by everyone on the Next Generation.  It would be interesting if someone (with more patience and dedication than me) went through the episodes and checked how many times Worf’s suggestions are actually correct, or at least sensible – quite a few times I suspect.

In general SF news,  the 2011 Nebula Award nominees have been announced  (Via The Angry Black Woman on twitter)

On twitter @infamy_infamy pointed me towards these two tumblrs about the representation of female anatomy in comic books, Less Tits n’ Ass, More Kickin’ Arse and Escher Girls.

More from s.e. smith at This Ain’t Livin: Human Monstrosities: Vampires and Villainism which is about the humanization of the vampire in recent vampire fictions.

I wasn’t kidding about the horror movie posters. From Final Girl, here are some posters for horror films based in space and (via Monsters in America), 10 Great Horror Movie Posters.

I wasn’t kidding about the epic Barbarian art either, check it out it!  I could say many things about this, but right now  I want to go and watch Star Trek.

So, it was Valentine’s Day last week.  Be glad you didn’t receive any of these vintage cards  … at least I really hope you didn’t.

“Fury”: Kes & Misogyny in Star Trek Voyager

I enjoy watching all the Star Trek series and spin offs, but a condition of my enjoying them is my having to accept that they were written and produced by people who, in imaginative terms, appear to have been utterly unable to move beyond the historical context of their own adolescence, hence, I have to accept that Star Trek is basically a fantasy about 1950s North Americans set in space.

This means that although it’s set in the 23^rd century, the characters’ interests and hobbies look uncannily like what you would except of geeky, middle-class, white male adolescents in the 1950s/60s, e.g. Raymond Chandler novels, Sherlock Holmes, amateur dramatics, chamber music, or jazz if you’re going really wild. Black characters like Commander Sisko might be allowed to enjoy Baseball and cooking.  Of course there are no self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender queer people (except sometimes in evil mirror universes), and gender norms and sexual arrangements seem archaic, even for the 1980s when Star Trek:TNG premiered.  Married monogamy is still the ideal, even though the economic basis that requires married monogamy has long since disappeared.  Although one character is usually allowed to be a bit of a lothario, until he inevitably settles down into married monogamy, almost everyone else is profoundly sexually repressed.  Most of the time I just find all this amusing or irritating, but occasionally the Star Trek writers come up with something so creepy, and yet so culturally revealing, that you just can’t quite believe what you’re seeing.

I was reminded of just such an instance the other day when chatting to Amanda (AJ) Fitzwater of Pickled Think on twitter (follow her @BiscuitCIB), about the creepy, misogynist representational car crash that is the relationship between Kes and Neelix in the second spin off series, Star Trek: Voyager.  I’ve written a bit before about gender and power in science fiction and this seemed a good opportunity to return to the subject.

I should say from the start that I can’t stand the character of Neelix.  He’s a spiteful, self-centred, passive-aggressive bully from the start, and his persistent racist harassment of the Vulcan character, Tuvok, is quite enough to make him loathsome before we even get to misogyny.   Neelix harasses Tuvok for no other reason than that Tuvok is a Vulcan and there are things about Vulcan identity and culture that Neelix personally disapproves of.  So he pesters him relentlessly with disrespectful comments about his culture and beliefs, and passive aggressive jibes when Tuvok doesn’t respond positively to this harassment.  Neelix is, as Amanda pointed out on twitter, positioned as the “white” person who demands to be educated by the person of colour, a power dynamic that is made more visible by the casting of a black actor in the role of Tuvok.  But apparently they have no racial harassment workplace policies in Starfleet, which I guess is just one more downside of creating a world based on 1950s North America, and Tuvok is simply expected to put up with it.  In fact, Janeway in one of her many strange decisions as a silly lady-captain, makes the most unpleasant member of her crew into the morale officer.  Anyway the racism in Star Trek deserves a post of its own and what I actually want to get into here is gender and misogyny.

At the beginning of the first season of Voyager, we are introduced to Neelix who is a Talaxian and his girlfriend, Kes. She comes from a species called the Ocampa who have a lifespan of only 9 years.  It is presented as a romantic relationship between a much older male and a very young female who is grateful to him for rescuing her from some remarkably boring baddies called the Kazon.  OK, you say, that’s bad, but surely they represented this relationship as a bit problematic didn’t they?   No, not at all, the writers are fine with it and represent it as an endearing relationship.  Well, there’s worse to come, for as we later discover in Season 2, Kes hasn’t even achieved sexual maturity for her species.  That’s bad enough, but then it also turns out that, not only is Neelix in a romantic relationship with someone who is basically a child, he is possessive, jealous and controlling of Kes.  He can’t stand her speaking to other men, constantly nags her about it and demands that she reassure him on this point.  OK, you might say, surely at this point the writers start to represent the relationship as unhealthy.  No, not a bit of it, apparently Neelix’s jealous temper tantrums and creepy controlling behaviours are absolutely FINE, they are ROMANTIC and prove how much he LOVES Kes.

Nothing creepy here

In fact, his relationship with Kes is not much more than an excuse for Neelix to express his epic man-pain and there is even one episode in which he and the main object of his jealousy (ship’s lothario Tom Paris) go on an away mission, fight about Kes and then bond over her.  How sweet.   In the twitter discussion, people observed that when Kes does finally hit puberty in Season 2 and is faced with the decision about whether or not to take her one chance to have a baby, because her species only gets one chance, we might reasonably expect this episode to be about her journey into adulthood and the hard choices that come with that?  NO, it’s mainly about Neelix’s man-pain as he struggles (i.e. runs away and hides) with the question of whether or not to become a father.  We are all relieved when Kes decides against pregnancy in the end.  Kes and Neelix do eventually break up, mainly I think because the actress wanted to leave (and who can blame her since, aside from a couple of interesting episodes, her role in the show mainly involves stroking the egos of male characters), and it makes me sad that they don’t show us that conversation, because I would have loved to watch Kes break up with Neelix. I hope it was brutal, although I suppose if they had shown it, they just would have made it all about his pain again.

Kes leaves Voyager when she comes into her full telekinetic powers and it becomes dangerous for her to remain on the ship any longer.  Although there’s a bit of the old ‘powerful woman=dangerous’ trope going on here, it isn’t too bad because at least we see Kes finally accepting her power, evolving as a person, moving forward in her life, and leaving behind a world in which she has been infantilised and limited.  We wish her well on her journey and make the mistake of falling into the false sense of the security that, now she’s gone, the Star Trek writers can’t do anything worse to her character. In this we are mistaken because they save the final kick in the guts for Season 6 when Kes returns for one of the most misogynist episodes in Voyager, a show  in which the high levels of misogynistic storytelling seem to have some connection with the higher proportion of major female characters in leadership roles than in the other shows.

Kes, it seems, could not be allowed to remain a powerful space entity and she returns to Voyager in an episode which is subtly titled ‘Fury’.   Get this, Kes has totally failed at being powerful and has (surprise!) been horribly punished for accepting her power.  She hated having power, she felt lost, confused and alone in her power … blah blah blah.  Not only that, but as happens quite often in Star Trek,  the possession of power has completely exploded her poor little lady-brain and she is now  “insane”, not to mention selfishly willing to murder her former crewmates to achieve her aim of returning home to her people where she won’t have to worry about being powerful.   She comes aboard the ship, fucks a bunch of shit up, and tries to manipulate time so that her younger self is sent back to Ocampa before any of this happened.  She accuses her crewmates of abandoning her, which it crap because it was her decision to leave the ship.  At the end of the episode, Kes has sense talked into her by her “good” (read non-powerful) younger self and is persuaded to return home to Ocampa to die, so at least we don’t have to worry about her being powerful anymore. Ding dong the witch is dead.

Kes making a mess everywhere because she is mad and evil

I never really warmed to Kes because her character is pretty insipid and passive, when she isn’t threatening to destroy Voyager, but this episode is a horrible, deeply misogynist betrayal of everything that her character had become.  It is yet another representation that reifies the misogynist cultural trope that says “women cannot handle power”, especially the kind of power that is usually reserved for men.  When women get power they are representationally punished for it, usually through a combination of at least two of the following options which are, in no particular order: 1. going “mad”, 2. becoming “evil”, 3. getting raped, 4. becoming lesbian/bisexual, 5. being killed.  The fate of Kes is no anomaly in Star Trek or popular culture in general and although the storyline is infuriating, it also points to how shows like Star Trek can reveal a lot about these deeply embedded cultural tropes.

Soundtrack to January

I think these music posts are always going to run a couple of weeks late.

I got Kristin Hersh’s live album Cats and Mice for Christmas.  Recorded in San Francisco in 2009, it has a generous 19 tracks drawn mostly from Learn to Sing Like a Star and Crooked, and an excellent production.  I gave the Throwing Muses’s 1996 album Limbo an outing, although I have to say this is the one album of their’s that I don’t entirely get.  I also listened to Star (1993) from Tanya Donnelly’s post-throwing Muses band Belly, an indie-pop album that stills sounds really fresh.

I realised that I hadn’t heard P J Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) for ages. I just loved this album so much when it came out, that I think I may have overplayed it.  Then there was Marianne Faithful’s, Before the Poison, which is a dream of an album for the likes of me because it includes collaborations with P J Harvey, Nick Cave, Damon Albarn and Jon Brion. I prefer Faithful since she fucked up her voice and these twisted little songs are perfect for her range, such as it is.  Also in the brilliant but slightly creepy category, we had Nina Nastasia’s extremely accomplished first album Dogs.

My Leonard Cohen listening this month comprised 1988′s I’m Your Man and Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979.   Although the songwriting on I’m your Man is as good as anything he’s done (except for ‘Jazz Police’ which is strangely awful), the 80s production takes a bit of getting used to, and I think my partner was ambivalent about it to say the least.  Such great songs though: the black humour of ‘First we Take Manhattan’, the catchy gloom of ‘Everybody Knows’, the “begging to be covered by a lesbian band” excess of ‘I’m your man’, the melancholy of ‘I can’t forget’ and, of course, ‘Tower of Song’.  The 1979 tour is one of my favourite Cohen live albums. It accompanies the album Recent Songs from the same year, and I think the live recording adds more feeling to these songs.

In Americana, Gillian Welch’s new album The Harrow and the Harvest was another Christmas gift which, while not as immediately arresting as her first few albums, is quickly growing on me. Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Bring the Flood (1996) was highly praised on its release, although I don’t think I like it as much as her early work.  Still, ‘Hold on, Hold on’ is a great song.  I tried to listen to Fly by The Dixie Chicks, but after a few songs my partner objected because apparently everyone was listening to it when she was in high school and hearing it again was freaking her out too much. I’ll have to wait until she’s out to finish it.

I had a bit of a 90s kick and discovered that a.), I no longer have the required levels of angst to listen to the Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream (1993) all the way through, b.) The Divine Comedy’s Casanova (1996) can still make me laugh a lot and cry a little with the last song ‘The Dogs and the Horses’, and c.), that my partner is deeply unimpressed by Blur’s 13 (1998) which, I have to admit, does come off as a little self-indulgent now.

I can feel an REM phase coming on.  We dusted off 1991′s The Best of REM which is thoroughly brilliant.

Tracks – with links to videos on YouTube

Kristin Hersh, Sugarbaby 
Belly, Feed the Tree 
P J Harvey, Big Exit on Later with Jools Holland
Marianne Faithful, My Friends Have
Nina Nastasia, Dear Rose
Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows live in London in 2008
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, The Way it Goes
Neko Case, Hold On, Hold On
The Dixie Chicks, Goodbye Earl
Smashing Pumpkins, Cherub Rock 
Divine Comedy, Songs of Love
Blur, Tender
REM performing Radio Free Europe on David Letterman in 1983.  Great hair Michael and great dancing everyone.

But the most life affirming music video I’ve seen this month has to be Cameo’s Word Up.  Levar Burton looking startled, a red codpiece, stripping police officers, what more could you possibly want?

This week’s culture round-up

Here’s a lovely post from fantasy writer Catherynne M. Valente, in which she attempts to explain the Arthurian legends to a 5 year-old: In which I completely fumble a child’s education

From Bad Reputation, Mark Graf reviews Cheek by Jowl’s production of John Ford’s tragedy, Tis’ Pity She’s a Whore, which sounds like an intriguing take on the text, and who doesn’t love a bit of 17th century revenge tragedy, eh?

You know, the older I get, the less I like Jeanette Winterson’s writing, but I found her essay in the New York Times about Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer really interesting. Hat tip: A Piece of Monologue.

Michael Cunningham, what have you done?  This new book sounds quite awful.

From Bitch Flicks, a review of the Glenn Close film Albert Nobbs: Exploring Constructions of Gender and Class 

The BBC showed a powerful documentary about the impact of AIDS in San Francisco in 1981: San Francisco’s Year Zero: We were here

On twitter, Roro of Creampuff Revolution pointed me in the direction of this lovely, touching site: Woolf and Wilde which features vintage photographs of men together (and sometimes women together) circa 1880 to 1950.

From Tor.com, here’s a bit of an offbeat take (which really hadn’t occurred to me) on the Charles Dickens bi-centenary: Happy 200th Birthday to Charles Dickens: A Man Integral to Science Fiction/Fantasy.

I haven’t even read much fan fiction, and yet, here I find myself riveted by the ongoing debate about the use of the term “Mary Sue”. I think this is because it raises so many issues around women’s writing, particularly the gendered cultural responses that are used to deny the value of women’s writing. So here’s another post on the subject: Who Mary Sue is and Who she Isn’t 

I love this: The Quiet Despair of the Starship Enterprise

From i09, 60+ Amazing Spaceship Concept Art Wallpapers

Now I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer (can’t stand Angel & ambivalent about Firefly), but I do get weary of all the feminist praise thrown Joss Whedon’s way when even Buffy is often problematic on that score, so I enjoyed this little post which draws connections between the sexist narrative patterns in Whedon’s shows: Seriously, it’s a really disturbing pattern.  Hat tip: Hoyden about Town.

Little Red Reviewer reviews SF novel  Faith by John Love, which sounds right up my street

Pickled Think has a list of SF&F anthologies relevant to feminism, activism and queer issues: Anthologies Relevant to my interests 

And, in science fact, Hubble captured a stunning image of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073

Gender Calamity/Gender Possibility: Calamity Jane (1953)

The1953 musical western Calamity Jane follows an ostensibly heteronormative narrative trajectory in which we see two rebellious young women being tamed and made ready for heterosexual marriage.  Wild tomboy and stagecoach guard, “Calam” (Doris Day), gets a makeover and learns how to be a woman, while aspiring burlesque performer, Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie), gives up on her dreams of being on stage for the love of a man.  But this surface narrative is in constant tension and conflict with the film’s high camp celebration of queer rebellion and non-normative desire which conveys an alternative story that, as Eric Savoy argues, questions “the possibility, or even the desirability of a coherent gender role” (151) or, for that matter, the very existence of “true”, or fixed identities.

The film came out of the 1950s post-war period during which women were under pressure to return to the home and, as such, it attempts to push the idea that no matter how much fun you might be having as a stage coach guard or a burlesque performer (all the while acknowledging that you probably are having one hell of a lot of fun), marriage is where true personal satisfaction lies.  It fails to convince, not least because the promise of marriage cannot cancel out the joyous, life-affirming queer energy of the film’s opening which presents us with the spectacle of Doris Days dressed in buckskin, standing astride the Deadwood stagecoach singing ‘The Deadwood Stage‘ –  ”Whip-Crack, Away!  Whip-Crack, Away! Whip-Crack, Away!”

The stubborn insistence of Doris Days’ queerness remains far in excess of the narrative’s heterosexist attempts at containment and “feminization”.  Moreover, her queerness has a career of its own, one that interlines and pulls against the conventional romantic script” (Savoy, 165).

In his excellent essay on Doris Day and queer performativity,  Eric Savoy argues that Calamity Jane interpellates a lesbian spectatorial position (153), but I think we could go further and suggest that the spectacle of Calamity Jane, especially in the early part of the film, could interpellate a range of non-normative subject positions- butch, genderqueer, transmasculine – that are not pinned  down to any particular sexual identity.  Throughout Calamity Jane this interpellation of queer, or non-normative subjectivity, pulls against the ostensibly heternormative narrative.

From the outset, Calamity Jane presents gender roles as socially constructed, rather than natural, as roles that have to be taught and learned.  Living out on the frontier, Calam, we are told, simply has not learned how to be a woman, but of course the implication that one has to learn how to be a woman undermines the very idea of fixed gender roles and identities.

Another interesting aspect of the film, in terms of its construction of gender, is that while the male characters accept Calam, they also try and police her gender performance through the practice of shaming (Savoy 170).  Her friend/rival Bill Hickcock is particularly coercive in his attempts to shame Calam into being more feminine, telling her to get some female clothes and fixins, and disputing her claims to be as masculine as the men.  It is this competition with Hickcock that causes Calam to go to Chicago to try and bring stage star Adelaide Adams back to perform in Deadwood.

But it’s not until Calam goes to Chicago and meets Katie Brown that she begins to feel that there might be something awry with her gender presentation: “I reckon I do look a mite strange to a lady like you”, she says to Katie.  Yet, it is also when Calam meets Katie that the initially fluid sexual possibilities suggested by her gender presentation threaten to solidify into something that looks more decidedly like lesbian representation.  As Savoy notes, Calam’s sexuality is defined by the film’s narrative as heterosexual, insofar as she has a crush on Lieutenant Danny, but this crush is also presented as extremely immature and therefore in doubt, leaving other possibilities open.

The relationship at the centre of the film is that between Calam and Katie Brown.  It is, after all, Katie, not the men, who recognizes Calam as “beautiful” and expends considerable effort trying to bring Danny and Bill around to her point of view.  Katie moves in which Calam and together they set about turning her shack into what Savoy calls a “little closet on the prairie”, “a site of domestic lesbian bliss”.  By suggesting erotic, as well as potentially housewifely meaning, their duet “A Woman’s Touch” veers close to reconfiguring their relationship into that of a visibly butch/femme couple (Savoy 173).

When Calam’s crush, Danny, falls in love with Katie, Calam’s jealous rage can be viewed from more than one angle.  Who is she really jealous of?  When Katie feels that Calam won’t be mollified, she leaves town rather than upset her friend any further.  It’s interesting that the emotional climax of the film is not the rather perfunctory and sudden switching of Calam’s affections from Danny to Bill Hickcock, but her racing her horse after Katie’s carriage to persuade her to return to Deadwood.  And let’s not even get started on the song ‘A Secret Love‘; a song that is supposed to be about Calam’s realization of her love for Bill, but, well, I’ll just let you watch Doris Day’s performance for yourselves.

So although everything appears to be sorted out at the end, with Katie and Calam marrying the “right” men, no matter how much effort the film puts into trying to convince us that Calam and Katie will be happier as housewives than stagecoach guards or burlesque performers (or prairie lesbians for that matter),  that fate never seems to offer the promise contained in their big numbers, in the energy of ‘The Deadwood Stage’, the athletic exuberance of Calam’s “The Windy City”, or the joyous naughtiness of Katie’s “Keep it under your hat”.   After these performances, the marriages of Calam and Katie do seem to represent what Molly Hashell calls “the creeping paralysis of adult womanhood”.

The setting is also interesting in terms of the sex and gender possibilities it produces.  This fantasy frontier space cannot be unproblematically celebrated, not least because the characters are quite upfront about the reason for their presence there, which is oppressing the inhabitants and stealing their land.  The film’s excruciating casual racism prevents it from being entirely enjoyable.  But as a space that is presented as being beyond “civilization”, it does suggest something interesting.  Perhaps gender coercive gendering is required by “civilisation” because coercive gendering is about upholding civilization, but if you’re outside of civilization, you don’t need to follow the same rules. It is certainly a space in which gender identities appear to be in flux.  The men of Deadwood cannot recognise that performer Francis Fryer is a man in drag, and when Bill Hickcock says “she ain’t very pretty”, it is only Calam, in a lovely “it takes one to know one moment”, who replies “that ain’t all she ain’t!” (Savoy 1778).  But once the men get over their anger at the deception committed by Francis and the bar owner, they accept him readily enough as a effeminate (coded gay) man, just as they accept Katie once she stops pretending to Adelaide Adams.

There is an element of historical truth here because Calamity Jane is based on a real figure, that of Martha Jane Cannary, a frontierswoman and professional scout  who at times in her life also worked as a dishwasher, a cook, a waitress, a dance-hall girl, a nurse, an ox team driver and a prostitute.  She was a notorious “character” who was known for cross-dressing and passing as male.  Whether we now interpret the historical Calamity Jane as butch lesbian, genderqueer, or transgender, it seems that the frontier allowed hir a more fluid gender and sexual identity than was possible for many women who lived in more “civilized” places.

The possibilities represented by the historical Calamity may be softened in the film, but I think they are so disruptive, they cannot be contained and persistently haunt the narrative.  It’s interesting that as the now supposedly happily married couples ride away at the end, they are singing Calamity’s song “The Deadwood Stage” recalling the queer thrill of the opening credits, and suggesting that this thrill has not been entirely vanquished by marriage.

Further reading, Eric Savoy, ‘That ain’t all she ain’t': Doris Day and Queer Performativity’, in Ellis Hanson (ed), Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film (1999).  I highly recommend this anthology to anyone interested in queer theory and film.

Incest and abuse in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Spoiler alert for the plot and trigger warning for discussion of familial sexual abuse

Although it’s by no means an intentionally feminist film, Alfred Hitchcocks’ Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is a film that has a great deal to say about women, the family and patriarchy.

The film’s protagonist is Charlie, a young woman positioned somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, who has an innocent crush on her Uncle Charlie, her mother’s younger brother for whom she was named.  This isn’t too surprising considering the awful boredom of the life that she’s living in a small town with her painfully “average” family, including a benign but emotionally absent and useless father, a drudge of a mother and two younger siblings.  Charlie is therefore ecstatic when her mysterious Uncle arrives for a visit, but it’s apparent from the outset that Uncle Charlie is not in the slightest bit innocent and that he’s exploiting his niece’s fixation on him for ends that are not immediately clear.  As the film progresses, it’s revealed that the FBI are on Uncle Charlie’s trail and that he may or may not be the psychopathic killer of several wealthy widows.

Shadow of a Doubt is unflinching in its representation of the dullness and drudgery of women’s lives in small-town America during the period in which it’s set.  Young Charlie is bored out of her brain, having graduated from high school with no prospect of going to college, she’s waiting around for someone to marry her so that she can embark on the same kind of life that has left her mother a hollowed-out, anxiety-ridden wreck.   Little wonder that she finds her handsome, well-travelled uncle so exciting.

For both Charlie and her mother, Uncle Charlie represents a chance to vicariously experience some glamour and freedom.  When young Charlie insists that she and her uncle are alike, and perhaps even share some kind of mystical connection, we feel that this is because he represents something that she desperately wants and is denied.   But as the story progresses young Charlie begins to have doubts about her uncle and to regret her unthinking allegiance to him, especially when an FBI Agent arrives and tells her that he may be the murderer they’ve been pursuing.

Shadow of a Doubt is a very dark film in which the narrative suspense is based on the ways in which patriarchy enables, supports and covers up for men like Uncle Charlie.   The shadow of incest hangs over the story and as it progresses it becomes interpretable as an allegory about familial sexual abuse.  Charlie flirts with his niece and, initially, she rather welcomes the attention.  When her friends ogle him on the street, she’s happy to have him mistaken for a boyfriend rather than a relative.  But these advances soon take a more sinister turn, involving the gift of a valuable ring and a relationship that  becomes increasingly possessive and physically domineering.  The possibility that Uncle Charlie may be a sexual predator as well as a murderer is suggested by the fact that the widows were strangled, because strangulation can easily stand as a metaphor for rape.  The dehumanizing hatred of the widows that he expresses certainly goes well beyond a simple desire to steal their money.

With most of her family willingly taken in, young Charlie finds herself combating a potential murderer with only her wits for support, for as he says to her, “Who would believe you?”  Then when she finds herself a suitor in one of the FBI Agents pursuing her uncle, he becomes actively murderous.  On the surface of the narrative, this is because he fears she may betray him to the FBI, but you can’t escape the feeling that he’s also angry at her disloyalty on quite another level.  While her family remain cheerfully oblivious to the danger in their midst, Charlie begins to realise that her life is in danger.

There was one scene that I found particularly chilling and difficult to watch. The family are going out to a lecture and her mother tells Charlie to go in the car with her uncle while the rest of the family travel by taxi.  Charlie’s attempts to get out of being along with her uncle in the car, without telling her mother what’s really wrong, are painfully recognizable to survivors of familial sexual abuse.  Uncle Charlie also threatens her with the idea that if anything happens to him, it will “kill her mother”.

Shadow of a Doubt is based on the assumption that women are expected to live through men, but are punished for making the “wrong” choices and for wanting more than they should have.  In one of the most telling scenes, Uncle Charlie takes his niece to a seedy bar to bully her, and there they meet one of her old schoolmates, a prematurely worn-down waitresses.  The friend is taken with the ring that Uncle Charlie gave his niece, repeatedly saying how much she would like a man to come and give her a ring like that.  Her desperation is pitiful, but young Charlie has learned that men’s gifts do not necessarily mean what her friend thinks they mean.  Rather than love and romance, the ring now stands for secrecy, abuse and possibly rape and murder.

The film ends with Uncle Charlie’s attempt to punish and murder his niece by pushing her from a moving train, but she manages to struggle free and pushes him to his death.  In the last scene, we see a chastened Charlie with her detective boyfriend, having learned her lesson about looking for excitement, and presumably about to embark on the same kind of limited life that her mother endures.   Ultimately, the film presents a world in which women cannot win: if they want excitement, they risk ending up with men like Charlie and may suffer the fate of the widows he murdered; if they want to avoid such risks, they have to settle for men like the dull but safe FBI agent for whom she has little passion, but who we know she will marry.  It’s also telling that Uncle Charlie is buried with his secrets and, ultimately, everyone covers up for him.

One of the things I find interesting about Hitchcock in general is his utter lack of faith in the family as a “safe” space and his propensity to represent its more sinister aspects.  So for me, the “doubt” at the heart of Shadow of a Doubt is not simply Charlie’s doubt about her uncle, but the more fearful doubt that her family is indeed an “average” family, in which case perhaps more “average” families contain horrors like Uncle Charlie.

This week’s culture round up

Let’s start with one for the queer theory fans – Michael Warner in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Queer and Then?

The World of Heyerwood has a post considering the question of whether Jane Austen read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women

From Elisa Rolle, a post about Anglo-American gay writer Christopher Isherwood

I know I’m biased, but I think my partner’s post about The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner is rather good. She was reading it for long enough.

From The Guardian, an article about Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

From Pickled Think, Fat people are not your literary go to for evil

There’s no way in hell I could read or watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo given the themes, but this is an interesting and nuanced post from the F-Word: The cultural narratives they are a-changing

From Indie Wire, Cross-Post: 20 Years of Black Lesbian Cinema Before Pariah

From This Ain’t Livin’, No Disability at the Final Frontier: science fiction, cures and elminationalism

From io9, 10 Unsung Science Fiction TV Classics, none of which I’ve actually watched

This My Little Pony cartoon take on Star Trek: TNG makes the internet worthwhile for me

From Believer Mag, an interview with Laurie Anderson. Very cool.

Etta James died at the age of 73.  My favourite song from her is Lovin’ Arms – yes I’m a sap.

And my favourite tumblr discovery last week was gross jeans which is full of awesome photographs

Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O. Selznick

In Spellbound Ingrid Bergman plays Dr Constance Peterson, a brilliant psychiatrist, and the only female member of staff at the psychiatric hospital where she works.  The film begins with the Director, Dr Murchison, being forced to retire following a mental breakdown.  Constance immediately falls in love with his replacement, Dr Edwardes, but within a few days discovers that her lover is not Dr Edwardes at all, but a paranoid amnesiac who has stolen his identity and may actually be guilty of Edwardes’s murder.

Believing in her lover’s innocence, Constance decides to go on the run with him in the hope of using her psychoanalytic skills to treat his amnesia and prove his innocence.  Risky behaviour, you might think, because he could turn out to be a murderer after all.  And the plot doesn’t sound very promising from a feminist perspective either does it? – silly irrational woman, throwing away her career for her love of a dodgy man and all that, but what I liked about Spellbound is precisely the way it plays around with gendered assumptions and the projections, not only of its characters, but also its audience, drawing us into a narrative in which the audience, like Constance, must try and read the signs to get at the truth.

Unsurprisingly, Constance makes her male colleagues anxious and they project their hostility onto her in ways that are still recognisable, namely, sexual harassment and accusations of coldness, frigidity etc., when she doesn’t respond to the harassment.  In Constance’s use of polite humour to deflect her main harasser, Dr Feurot, we recognise the strategy of a woman trying to manage a difficult situation.  I’ve noticed that responses to the film have accepted Constance’s male colleagues assessment of her as “cold” without pausing to wonder if this is just a sexist projection that has nothing to do with Constance and everything to do with anxieties about professional women which were very pertinent in 1945 – can Constance really be considered cold for rejecting the sexual advances of a dried up old psychiatrist?  The fact that she falls immediately and passionately in love with the Gregory Peck character (later revealed as John Ballentyne) suggests to me that she was just waiting for a man she actually liked to come along.  When Constance seeks the help of her old friend and mentor Dr Alexander Brulov, she finds that he too can’t get beyond the sexism that underlies his feeling that she is being a typically irrational woman and putting herself in danger for love.  Constance ignores these threats and carries on regardless, convinced of both her own brilliance as an analyst and her love of the man who can’t remember his own name.

Through its sexist male characters, the film invites the audience to project their own hostility towards professional women onto Constance and, in so doing, distracts the audience from what’s really going on.  The men in the film use a threat that we still see being used against women today – that being excellent at what you do will result in an impossible conflict between your professional and your personal life.  This is the plot of The Red Shoes a few years later in 1948 in which a woman goes “mad” and dies because she can’t reconcile marriage with her professional and artistic life as a ballet dancer.

You could argue that Spellbound is a sexist film, and I would agree that it’s not exactly a feminist revolution in filmmaking, but I would suggest that it’s more of a film about sexism that also uses sexism to try and trick its audience into seeing things a certain way.   Most of the narrative is spent suggesting that Constance is being a silly, perhaps even a “mad” woman, who’s putting herself in danger.

The tagline on this poster reads “The maddest love that ever possessed a woman”.  But this poster also seems to be expressing some anxieties about women. I think it’s intriguing that it represents Constance’s looming face in the background as a threat to a vulnerable, frightened figure of John in the foreground, rather than the other way around, as if it’s Constance who is the “mad” and dangerous one.

But ultimately the film undermines the narrative it has set up by proving both Constance’s professional and personal judgement to have been correct all along – she turns out to be perfectly right to believe that John is innocent of murder and presents no danger to her.  She is after all, (within the terms of the film anyway) an excellent analyst and she not only cures John but solves the larger mystery and faces down the real villain who’s had everyone “spellbound”.

In Spellbound it isn’t actually women who are “mad” or irrational, though they are accused of it, it’s the men. Constance’s lover John is an amnesiac and a classic hysteric who collapses every time he sees lines on a white surface. The film is full of mental health fail as you might expect from 1945, but in the representation of John it’s probably referencing the real issue of symptoms experienced by veterans returning from World War II because it turns out that John is suffering mainly from what we’d now call post traumatic stress disorder, a condition that has been manipulated by the true villain of the piece.  There’s also an interesting role reversal in the representation of the man as helpless, vulnerable and victimised and the woman as the rescuer with the agency.  And it’s not just John, the true villain also turns out to be deeply unstable, prepared to commit murder and have an innocent man locked up for the rest of his life just in order to achieve a rather petty end.

The (mis)representation of psychoanalysis in the film is silly, though not as bad the more disturbing mangling of psychoanalytic ideas that appear in later Hitchcock films like Psycho and Marnie.  Constance takes a cod-Freudian approach in which John must simply relive his repressed trauma in order to recover from his symptoms.  There are Salvador Dali designed dream sequences too – it’s rather disappointing that in reality dreams never seem to look like Salvador Dali paintings, well, mine don’t anyway.  While that’s all entertaining to people (like me) who are interested in the representation of psychoanalysis in popular culture, I don’t think it’s what’s interesting about this film.

At the end of Spellbound all the projections are revealed as simply that, projections.  Constance and John get married and it’s implied that she will carry on with her professional life as a psychiatrist as well.  The conflict between the professional and the personal is an illusion and not something that apparently concerns Constance or John.

The spell is broken.  But who was spellbound?  Was it Constance by her love for John? Everyone by the villain who managed to pull the wool over all their eyes? Us, the audience, by our own projections about women?

Siouxsie and The Banshees, Spellbound

The Best Books I read in 2011

Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)

Beginning the story in 1682, Morrison sets out to address the early colonial settlement of North America  through the stories of four women over just 165 pages.  Opinions vary as to her success, but this poetic book says something profound about the foundation of the USA in slavery, the suppression of women and a toxic mixture of capitalism and religion.  It’s been called a sort of prequel to Beloved and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who liked that book.

Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (2009)

I can’t actually remember much about this book because I read it when my father was dying and that time is a blur, but I do remember thinking it was very good, if not quite up to the standard of Runaway.  Munro is one my favourite writers when it comes to the lives of women.  I’ll have to read it again though.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth(1905)

Wharton’s tremendous critique of consumerism, social convention and the sexual double-bind is still gripping.  A beautiful, but poor, socialite called Lily Bart falls foul of the wealthy New York elite when she finds that she can’t reconcile her desires with making a marriage of convenience.

Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Dread of Death(2008)

I found this book very helpful while my father was dying and also for my own subsequent death anxiety.  Death anxiety, Yalom argues, is the price we pay for our self-awareness.  Honest, humane, sensible, and free from the cliches and superficial platitudes that often infect the “self-help” genre.  Yalom is an atheist, but I think there’s useful stuff in this book for anyone facing death, or experiencing death anxiety.

Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga (eds) This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

One of the seminal texts that should be read by anyone who’s serious about getting to grips with feminist theory and the history of the women’s movement.  This book is an incisive critique of a feminism dominated by white, middle-class women and a powerful assertion of the need for theory produced by radical women of color.  But reading this book 30 years on from its publication, it’s disturbing to see  how little has changed.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters(1975)

The best collection of short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin that I’ve read so far.  If you’re interested in her shorter fiction, I’d start with this one because it’s wide ranging, showcases her at her best and includes nice introductions by the author contextualizing each story.

Emma Donoghue, The Sealed Letter(2008)

The Sealed Letter is an entertaining fictionalisation of a scandelous Victorian divorce case. Donoghue is a very good writer of middlebrow fiction, great for when you want something that’s not too challenging to read but isn’t silly either.  You know it’ll be readable and well-researched and, for me, it’s nice to find a good middlebrow writer who deals with lesbian themes.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower(1995)

This is relentlessly harrowing and bleak speculative fiction and also a stern warning about the path that our current economic and environmental policies might be taking us down.  Like most of her books, it makes for uncomfortable reading, but what I love about Butler is the uncompromising nature of her stories and the way that she’s prepared to take her readers all the way into hell.

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996)

A Jesuit-funded mission to another planet goes horribly wrong.  Perhaps that doesn’t sound very promising, but The Sparrow is a rather brilliant piece of science fiction which draws on Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K Le Guin and Carl Sagan to create something new.

Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (1951)

I haven’t got around to writing about this one yet, but I will because I loved it.  It’s a gripping mystery in which Du Maurier pulls off the difficult trick of using a dislikeable (stupid & misogynist) narrator to tell her story and, in so doing, creates a fascinating book about the misogynist construction of femininity.  I’m not sure if I liked it more than Rebecca, but it’s a close run thing.

Dorothy Allison, Two or Three things I know for Sure (1996)

Another book that deserves a longer post.  Dorothy Allison is a literally life saving lesbian writer who doesn’t get enough attention from feminism or lesbian criticism, possibly becasue she’s too honest and hard-hitting and makes people uncomfortable.  This short memoir about survival packs an enormous amount of power into its 94 pages.

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (1996)

Required reading, I think, for anyone who wants to become a fantasy writer.  It’s a big soap opera, but one heck of a well-written one.  Martin cleverly provides so many characters that his readers are almost bound to find at least one to identify with.  I’m not one for tearing through books in general, but I got through the 800-odd pages in about a week.

2011 in Film

The Best Films I saw in 2011

The Reader (2008)

A young German boy has a brief affair with an older woman and years later finds out that she’s on trial for Nazi war crimes. I didn’t have high expectations for The Reader because it was so critically lauded that I thought it would be bound to disappoint on viewing.  The beginning was not at all promising, being the standard, male-centric, “fond memories of vagina” narrative  that we never seem to get tired of regurgitating, but then, about a third of the way through, the film opened up and turned into a nuanced meditation on guilt and responsibility with a tremendously powerful performance from Kate Winslet.

I Am Love (2009)

Another incredible performance from a great actress, this time Tilda Swinton as the upper middle-class wife and mother who finds herself experiencing a sexual awakening in middle-age through her affair with a much younger man.  I found the tragic ending a bit much and felt ambivalent about the revelation of her daughter’s lesbianism being used as inspiration for the heterosexual woman’s sexual explorations, but still it’s an interesting female-centred film that’s worth a look for Swinton’s performance.

Source Code (2011)

Pure science fiction entertainment.  Source Code has a clever plot and casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the kind of everyman role that suits him best. It also has two decent female characters, especially Vera Farmiga as Captain Colleen Goodwin.  Just don’t think about it too hard.

Die Hard (1988)

It really has taken me this long to get around to watching Die Hard and I was not disappointed.  This testosterone-fuelled fun ride sees Bruce Willis, as apparently indestructable New York cop John McClane, well on his way to his position as an actor whose masculinity is so overdetermined that it cannot be questioned.  Alan Rickman chews the scenery chamingly as the terrorist who’s unreasonably decided to take everybody hostage just before Christmas.

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Still holding up well on it’s third outing, still funny and moving at the same time.  In this film our heroes must face death and learn to let go.  Did I cry? Oh yes, I’m almost crying right now just thinking about the scene in which the toys hold hands as they slip slowly toward their doom in a trash incinerator.  On a lighter note, the scenes in the kindergarten are hysterical, especially if you have toddlers in your life.

Monsters (2010)

Everyone I speak to about this film says it wasn’t what they expected, but I’m not sure what any of us were expecting.  Following a NASA accident, Mexico has been “infected” by alien life forms.  A cynical journalist offers to escort a tourist through the infected zone to the US border.  Slow moving, beautifully filmed, with rather unsympathetic but human characters, and although the allegory about immigration and borders is a little heavy-handed and you can see the ending coming, it’s a very atmospheric film which conveys a real sense of dread.

The Red Shoes (1948)

A ballet dancer finds herself torn between art and love.  I have a longer post about The Red Shoes in the pipeline, but it really is one of the most stunning pieces of film I’ve ever seen. If you want to see a really hystrionic ballet movie with proper dancing forget Black Swan, this is the real thing.  Moira Shearer was an excellent dancer and Powell and Presberger made the brave decision to create an actual ballet especially for the film.   It’s sort of homophobic in its representation of the parasitic relationship between the diva and the gay impressario, but it’s also grappling with the homophobia and misogyny that renders the impressario unable to create, except through the diva, and the diva unable to fully self-actualise as an artist without sacrificing her personal life.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Popular but arrogant teenager, Ferris Bueller, decides to take an unauthorized day off school, dragging along his girlfriend and neurotic best friend, Cameron, but Ferris has some enemies who’d like to bring him down, namely his school principle and jealous sister.  After being forced to sit through Pretty in Pink a couple of times in my youth, I went off John Hughes, but my partner persuaded me to give this a go and I really enjoyed it.  It’s not feminist, but in terms of gender is possibly the least annoying of Hughes’s films (probably because it’s not about girls!) and while Ferris’s girlfriend is a non-entity, Jennifer Grey puts in a performance that reminds you what a  great comedien she once was. Very funny, but with an underlying sadness.

Solaris (1972)

What the hell? I think Solaris amounts to one of the strangest film experiences I’ve ever had.  Three hours of bizarreness spread over two discs, with the surreal effect increased by a mistake on our discs which caused the English dubbing to intermittently shift back into Russian with English subtitles.  A psychologist, Kris Kelvin, is sent to investigate the situation on a space station above the planet Solaris where an alien intelligence seems to be causing problems.   Aboard the grotty, run-down station he finds the scientists dealing with the manifestation of people from their pasts.   I found Solaris painfully slow and often rather boring (people stand at windows and quote Dostoevsky) but it kept us watching, mainly because of Natalya Bondarchuck’s mesmerising performance as the manifestation of Kris’s long-dead wife, Hari, and also because you can see it influencing so many other SF films (i.e., Moon).  Solaris is about science, conscience, memory, and probably a bunch of other things that I didn’t get.

Jane Eyre (2011)

Chilly, Gothic, stripped back adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte favourite, which pulls off the very difficult task of making Rochester sympathetic on screen.

Spellbound (1945)

Another film about which I have a longer post brewing, but in brief I loved this Hitchcock directed thriller about a female psychiatrist who falls in love with the new director of the institution where she works, only to find that he’s actually an amnesiac who may be guilty of murder.  She decides to go on the run with him and try to treat his amnesia in the hope of revealing his innocence.  A great role for Bergman, brilliantly directed, as you would expect, with added Salvidor Dali dream sequences and hilarious use of a pair of glasses to try and make Ingrid Bergman look ‘a bit plain’.  There’s a lot of anxiety on show in this film about women entering the professions, but our heroine wins out in the end.

Entertaining, but …

I found Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010) enjoyable despite being overlong, and the animation of the story of the three brothers was stunning.  The comedy thriller Red (2010) was more style than substance but a lot of fun with Bruce Willis playing around with the macho mythology he established in films like Die Hard and decent roles for Helen Mirren and Mary Louise Parker.  Shutter Island (2010) was an enjoyably over-the-top gothic thriller and I’m definitely warming to Leonardo DiCaprio as he gets older.  The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) was fun (not least for Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep behaving like a couple of total horndogs throughout), although I don’t think the double narrative entirely worked.  Salt (2010), a preposterous thriller with Angelina Jolie in a role originally intended for a male actor inadvertently raised interesting questions about gender and the action hero. Calamity Jane (1953) – longer post coming for this one – was cheerfully sexist, racist and lesbaphobic and yet massively enjoyable in its extreme campiness.  True Grit (1969) was OK after a slow start, but is very dated now.  How to Train Your Dragon (2010) had a bog standard boy’s story with the usual ‘tough-girl-diminishes-into-love interest’ cliche that goes with that narrative, but it had great animation and the dragons were so well realised they charmed my socks off.

Disappointing

A Single Man (2009) looked good, but the story mainly reminded me how little I owe to the respectable, privileged gay men and lesbians who hid out in surburbia and how much I do owe to the disreputable gay men, dykes and and trans folk who rioted and marched for the rights we have today.  I found Black Swan (2010) to be a weirdly old-fashioned cross between The Red Shoes (without the good dancing), Polanski’s Repulsion and an American remake of a Japanese horror film.  In The Portrait of a Lady (1996) Jane ‘all women are masochists’ Campion  launched an assault on Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, representing Isabelle Archer  as (surprise!) a masochist – Nicole Kidman crying for two hours does not a good film make. Neil Gaimen’s Mirrormask (2005) looked gorgeous but managed to be deeply unfeminist despite having a female protagonist.

The worst

300 (2006), a film so racist, homophobic, misogynist and disablist it’s almost funny in its appallingness, but it takes itself too seriously to achieve even ‘so bad it’s good’ status.  Knowing (2009) had some potential, but the execution was so heavy-handed and the story was overwelmed by too much nasty computer generated imagery.  And I’m not sure what they did to Nicholas Cage’s face – cosmetic surgery or CGI? – but whatever it was, it was highly offputting.

2011 in Books

New books read in the order that I read them with links to the ones that I’ve got around to writing about so far.  In addition to the SF and fantasy binge, I  think I read more non-fiction and popular science books than usual this year.

Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
Tanith Lee, Sabella, or the Bloodstone
Alice Munro, Too Much Happinness
Amanda Foreman, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
John Gribbin, Galaxies, A Very Short Introduction
Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: an open letter to a new generation of therapists
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Carl Sagan, Contact
Leslea Newman (ed.), My Lover is a Woman: contemporary lesbian poems
Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: overcoming the dread of death
Emma Donoghue, Landing
A.P., Sabine
Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga (eds) This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen
Diana Souhami, Wild girls: The Love Lives of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks
Simon Singh, Big Bang: the most important scientific discovery of all time and why you need to know about it
Kathryn M Drennan, Babylon 5 Book 9, To Dream in the City of Sorrows
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
George RR Martin and Lisa Tuttle, Windhaven
Emma Donoghue, The Sealed Letter
Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist
Roger Zelazny, The Dream Master
Kate Willhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Liz Williams, Banner of Souls
Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender
Robin Mckinley, The Hero and the Crown
Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

Rereading
Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
M. R. James, Count Magnus and Other Stories
Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia
Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road
Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
M. R. James, The Haunted Dolls House and Other Stories

This week’s culture round-up

I was hoping to make a start on my enormous backlog of posts and get some actual writing done this week, but an evil head cold has left me with just enough energy for a link round-up and nothing else.  The rest will have to wait until the New Year.

Let’s start with something serious.  From Lambada Literary, one for the queer theory fans, a review of an interesting book from Judith Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Quite a decent article about Jane Austen in the Guardian (via @nineteenthcenturystuff on twitter)

From Adventures of Comic Book Girl, another contribution to the recent feminist discussions about the term ‘Mary Sue’, Why the concept of Sue is sexist

From Tor.com, a post about one of my favourite SF novels, The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

From Robert Ebert, a review of one of my favourite SF films, Contact.

From Den of Geek, an article about Philip Kaufman’s excellent 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I love the 1956 one too.  Not at all feminist either of them, but excellent films both.   The 2007 version, Invasion, which stars Nicole Kidman is a bit more feminist, but sadly not as good in other respects – although I didn’t think it was as bad as the reviewers claimed.

Personally, I think horror films about sweaty, beardy, paranoid men are for all the year round, but Den of Geek tells us why The Thing is just the thing for the festive season

From science fiction and other suspect ruminations, some doomed cities, post-apocalyptical ruins and war wrecked landscapes. Festive, no?

Here’s some silly Lord of the Rings stuff.  From Deeky at Dharma Pancakes a Lord of the Rings Pez Set. Also, (via @Scriptrix on twitter) here’s a well creepy Elvish wedding ring

From Tor.com, Star Trek people drinking coffee

And here’s one for the season.  My Mum used to have a knitted Virgin and Child tree ornament (which has since “disappeared”), but it had nothing on any of these:  The 11 most unintentionally creepy christmas ornaments

Soundtrack to November

Music post even later this month.  I seem to have lost the last couple of weeks somewhere along the way.

Oh well, the seasonal listening continued in November with more of the artists that I tend to associate with winter.  I’m still working my way through Johnny Cash’s Unearthed (2003) collection, mainly focussing on the second disc, Trouble in Mind, a collection of covers which ends with a quite sublime version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on a Wire’.

Speaking of Cohen, I listened to the Live at the Isle of Wight concert album.  Cohen was praised for calming down the fractious crowd at the Isle of Wight Festival.  Perhaps it was the intimacy of his music, the way he sounds like he’s singing to each individual, that did the trick; perhaps it was his request that everyone light a match to show him where they were that created a sense of community, or perhaps he was just so stoned that he didn’t realise he was being sent out to face a crowd on the verge of riot.

There was plenty of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds this month (another winter warmer), with the intense personal disintegration (and epic man-pain) of Let Love In (1994), the reinvention of Nick as a soul/gospel singer in Abbatoir Blues  (2004) which a lot of hardcore fans (and some members of the band) hated. Then I returned to origins with the first disc of his B-sides and Rarities which has some great accoustic tracks, and in which Nick has much woman-trouble (warning: feminism deficit!) and the more recent Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008) which seems to be an attempt to get back to basics and perhaps challenge those “gone soft” rumours.

Some of the americana albums getting an airing included Steve Earle’s Townes (2009) in which Steve pays tribute to one of my favourite country artists, Townes Van Zandt.  Then there was Neko Case’s live album The Tigers have Spoken (2004) which has a fantastic cover of Buffy Sainte Marie’s ‘Soulful Shade of Blue’, a storming version of ‘This Little Light’ and a really moving cover of country staple ‘Wayfaring Stranger’.  Also in americana, we had Ballad of the Broken Seas (2006) from Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanagen, an album full of different styles which somehow works as a whole.  Then there was Kristin Hersh’s, Murder, Misery and then Goodnight (1998) a collection of appalachian songs about murder and death, recorded with the help of her kids; it manages to be creepy, sweet and funny at the same time.

Where’s the woman rock? Well, I got into Kate Bush’s Aerial (2005), an album that I didn’t initially like but which is now growing on me and which seems to have converted my partner.  It’s different to Kate Bush’s other work and has to be accepted on its own terms.  The Real Ramona (1991) by the Throwing Muses is always worth a listen.  It’s their last album with Tanya Donelly in the line-up and I might say it was their best album if it wasn’t for the fact that I change my mind on that score all the time.  Patti Smith’s Trampin‘  (2004) is an album  that I tend to forget about and then get surprised by when I lsiten to it again. It’s as political as you might expect and full of the kind of songs that only Patti Smith can get away  with – songs that rhyme the word Ghandi with the word candy, for example, and a 12 minute epic called ‘Radio Baghdad’.  P J Harvey’s Uh Huh Her (2004) is not her best work, but I like the punky (fuck you, I’ll do what I want to) sound.  I also felt like a total lesbian sterotype sitting around listening to The Indigo Girls, Retrospective while drinking tea and wearing a sweater that I bought from the “men’s” section.

On a more poppy note, there there was Blondie’s Parallel Lines (1978) one of my parents’ favourites that always takes me straight back to my childhood and still sounds so sharp and fresh.  It’s full of shiny pop classics and when Debbie Harry sings ‘One way or another, I’m gonna find ya’ , I’m gonna get ya’, get ya’, get ya’, get ya’,  I believe her.

Tracks – with links to You Tube videos

Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire live at the Isle of Wight
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Let Love In live at the Albert Hall
Steve Earle, Loretta
Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Revolver
Neko Case, Soulful Shade of Blue
Kristin Hersh, Down in the Willow Garden live
Throwing Muses, Not Too Soon
Patti Smith, Cash
P J Harvey, The Letter
The Indigo Girls, Closer to fine - this footage would suggest that The Indigo Girls are not entirely comfortable making videos – I love the turtlenecks and ironic religious imagery
Blondie, One Way or Another

This week’s culture round-up

From Little Red Reviewer, a review of The Doomsday Book by science fiction writer Connie Willis.  I’ve never read anything by Willis and this sounds like a good place to start.

As I’m sure you all know by now, fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey died.  I haven’t read any of her novels either, though I have read an excerpt from The Ship Who Sang which I liked, and I’ve got the first of the Pern series on my bookshelf.

From Tor.com, The future of the book as depicted in science fiction

Also from Tor.com, some imaginary exoplanets. I’m very excited about exoplanets.

From Heroine Content, a review of SF comedy Attack the Block, a film that I’m looking forward to seeing.

From Womanist Musings, Race Lessons from Breaking Dawn Pt 1 .  For all the criticism of the Twlight series, it’s sparked a lot of interesting and constructive commentary, perhaps because it seems to hit so many cultural pressure points.

I really enjoyed this post from s.e. smith, writing at Tiger Beatdown, interrogating the politics of the often expressed feminist desire for “strong female characters”, What Do you Mean when you say you want Strong Female Characters?. I’ve always found the term “strong female character”  irritating because it seems oversimplistic.  I’d prefer to see complex, nuanced and wide-ranging representations of women.

From The Mary Sue, apparently Nichelle Nichols also read for the role of Spock in Star Trek.  I love Leonard Nimoy in the role, but that would have been really interesting and a lot more radical.

From Rookie, Season of the Witch: Why Teenage Girls are so Scary?   Great comments on The Exorcist

Lesbian cartoon chartacters?  What do you reckon? I know I had a bit of a thing for Velma from Scooby Doo.

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings live

I can’t remember who introduced me to Gillian Welch, but she’s become one of my favourite folk artists, an incredibly talented singer-songwriter whose expressive, world-weary voice is perfect for reinventing the appacalian and bluegrass traditions that she draws on in her songs.   So I was extremely pleased to get the chance to see her play live in Manchester last month with her long-term musical partner, David Rawlings, even if the tickets did require my spending the money I’d set aside to buy new work shoes.

It was more than worth the price.  Having played together since the early 1990s, Welch and Rawlings convey the seemingly effortless musical sympathy of two people who know each other extremely well – and which is always a joy to watch live.  The performance in the first forty minutes was perhaps a little polite, but they relaxed and loosened up a lot in the second half.  Seeing them live, I was really struck by just what an incredible musician David Rawlings is.

They played a lot of songs from the new album, The Harrow and the Harvest, which I don’t own yet so I can’t name them, but which sounded great.  From the sparse first album, Revival, they played ‘Annabelle’ and ‘Acony Bell’ (the “happy song”).  From the bluegrassy Hell Among the Yearlings, they played the dark ballad of rape and revenge, ‘Caleb Meyer’ and the evocative ‘Rock of Ages’.   From Time (The Revelator), they sang ‘I Want to Sing that Rock and Roll’ and an awesome extended version of ‘Revelator’.  From Soul Journey, we had ‘Look at Miss Ohio’ (one of my favourite Welch songs) and ‘Make Me a Pallet on your Floor’.   There were some good covers too, Ryan Adams’s ‘Too be young’, Johnny and June Cash’s ‘Jackson’ and ‘Snowin on Raton’ by Townes Van Zandt.  Welch said that when they first started out in Nashville, Townes would come to their gigs and whoop whenever they hit a note that he liked.

They made a lot of jokes about the darkness of the songs, but I find something very life-affirming about them, as they recreate a song-writing tradition that responds (unfinchingly) to life in a relentlessly hard world.

From a feminist perspective (rather like my experience of seeing Kristin Hersh) there’s something very powerful about seeing a woman performer who’s so confident, so in control of her own talent and doing exactly what she wants with it – a woman who has never apologised for her music; it just is what it is, you can take or leave it.

Here they are performing Caleb Meyer

Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

The Left Hand of Darkness is not only my favourite book by Ursula K Le Guin, but also one of my favourite books period. This must be at least the fourth time I’ve read it.  On its publication The Left Hand of Darkness was received as a groundbreaking piece of science fiction, winning the Nebula Award in 1969 and the Hugo Award in 1970.  Compelling, atmospheric, sometimes frightening, it offers the reader exquisite world-building and profound meaning.

The story is told through a series of narratives that have been put together by Genly Ai, an envoy of The Ekumen who has been sent to the isolated planet of Winter (or in the language of its people “Gethen”), a world still in its ice age. The narrative includes Genly’s report, extracts from the journal of his mysterious Gethenian ally Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, as well as extracts from the reports of earlier investigators and evocative stories from Gethenian mythology.

The Ekumen is a loose organisation of worlds that exists to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and the encouragement of trade in what has come to be called Le Guin’s “Hainish Universe”. The Ekumen’s policy towards first contact with new worlds is to send one envoy who will try and form a relationship with the people of that world and gain their agreement to further contact and potential membership.  If the first envoy is killed, the Ekumen sends another one to start again with the next generation.

At the beginning of the novel, Genly has been on the planet for around a year without making much progress, though he seems to have found an ally in Estravan, the prime minister of Karhide, the state where he’s been residing. Genly finds his mission complicated by the apparently unique physiology that characterizes the people of Gethen. The vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants are androgynes who only take on binary sex during kemmer, a once-monthly mating cycle when they may take on either a male or female sexual role.  The rest of the time they are in a state they call somer, which is neither male nor female.

Genly is a sympathetic and intelligent observer, but he finds this aspect of Gethenian life deeply disturbing.  He struggles to accept it for what it is and insists, for most of the narrative, on using male pronouns and seeing the androgynous aliens as “men”.  He also has to face the fact that he is regarded by the Gethenians as a sexual “pervert”, someone constantly in a state of Kemmer.

The resulting psychological struggle is played out in his relationship with Estravan, the one Gethenian who wants to help him in his mission, but who he finds it difficult to trust.  Despite Estravan’s efforts, Genly feels hostility that seems to have its source not only in some unfortunate miscommunications, but also with the disturbing sexual challenge that Estravan represents to Genly.

When Estravan falls from favour with the king of Karhide, Genly heads off to the rival state of Orgoreyn, a fully-fledged beaurocracy, where he finds himself the pawn of a political faction.  Refusing to heed Estravan’s warnings about his predicament, Genly is arrested and incarcerated in a prison camp.  Feeling guilt at hir role in Genly’s downfall, Estravan sets out on a desperate attempt to rescue him, and from this point onwards the novel develops into an exciting adventure and a moving love story.

The problem for Genly and the earlier investigators who visited Gethen is that they feel compelled to regard its people as male when they are in their somer state. Genly includes a narrative by an earlier female investigator who attempts to explain that, while she knows they are not male or female, she feels justified using the male pronoun on the basis of the idea that “he” is less defined, less specific than “she”.  Whether she was entirely aware of it at the time, Le Guin is making a point here about how men are seen as the default, the human, while women are seen as “gender”.  This creates a tension throughout the narrative because while Genly misgenders the Gethenians, reading between the lines, the reader can see that they are not men or women, but rather a people for whom such categories are meaningless outside of kemmer.

Le Guin was criticised by feminists for choosing to use male rather than female pronouns in the book, but I think it makes a salient point about how the meaning of sex is constructed in binary terms and, although it’s annoying, it’s a productive annoyance that makes you think.  What I think I would do differently, though, is introduce gender neutral pronouns for the parts of the story that are narrated by Estravan. We’re told that the Gethenians have neutral somer pronouns, we’re just not told what they are!  I think this would have made a more powerful point.  We can assume that the reason for the appearance of binary gendered pronouns in Estravan’s story is due to the fact that Genly is translating it for us, but I think it’s still a bit of a shame that Le Guin didn’t go there.  Still, the book was written in 1969 sometime before feminists really starting grappling with this stuff, so I’m not going to be too hard on Le Guin.  She does attempt to redress the balance in her stories ‘Winter’s King’ (in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters) which uses all female pronouns and, more successfully I think, in ‘Coming of Age in Karhide’ (in The Birthday of the World) where she does a better job of conveying the nature of Gethenian androgyny.

From a feminist perspective, The Left Hand of Darkness remains a powerful attempt to imagine a vibrant, complex society in which nothing is defined by biological sex.  Everyone runs the same risk of pregnancy and childbearing – one may be both the mother and father of children. Anyone can turn their hand to anything. Gethenian society has plenty of power dynamics and codes of conduct, not to mention different religious traditions, but there is no division of people into strong and weak halves and no rape; there are no manipulative games based on gender, no expressions of macho “dominance”, and no concept of feminine “submission”.

I’m not sure what is it that I personally find so compelling about The Left Hand of Darkness. Whatever it is seems to be lodged in my unconscious, but it’s something about the relationship between Estravan and Genly, and something in Le Guin’s attempt to imagine, in Estravan, a person who has no sense of splitting or loss, a person who feels entirely whole.

Another aspect of the text that has received less discussion is the fact that none of the characters are white people.  Genly is a black man from Earth and the Gethenians are a dark skinned people with black hair. There is in the text a de-centring of whiteness that is also quite powerful.

With this in mind, I think it’s worth looking at some cover art. Interestingly, most of the covers depict the landscape of Winter, but those that have attempted to depict people have tried to avoid representing both the ethnicity and androgyny of the Gethenians.

This cover of the 1976 edition is, I think, one of the most beautiful sci fi paperback covers ever produced, but it’s interesting that the artist has given the people typically anglo saxon facial features and by carving the faces out of the ice of Winter has further compounded the impression of whiteness.  Lovely though the cover is, the people in the book look nothing like this (they look rather more like Native Americans, I think).    The image is also oddly phallic, thrusting up out of the ice like that – a bit of anxiety perhaps?

This is the first paperback edition from Ace Books in 1969.  Another lovely cover, but I would say the two figures are depicted as male rather than androgynous.  They are of indeterminate ethnicity, but not obviously dark skinned like the people in the book.  The sameness of the faces seems to suggest the idea that a people without binary sex would be oddly identical to one another, as if binary sex has something to do with individuality.  It’s a lot less phallic though.

Is this a cop out, or not?  I’m not quite sure what it has to do with the text.  Perhaps the figure is meant to represent one of the Handdarata, the mystics of Karhide who practice foretelling.  It’s another very phallic image, th0ugh, full of pointy things everywhere you look,  and the figure at the centre looks rather like a phallus too.  It’s slightly threatening!  A bit like Genly’s narrative, this cover seems to be insisting on the inherent maleness of the people of Gethen.

In different ways they all show the representational disturbance that the people of Winter present.

This week’s culture round up

From The Guardian, literature’s greatest unseen characters. I think my favourite unseen character is probably Rebecca in Daphne Du Maurier’s novel of the same name.

From Lambada Literary, a review of a new poetry collection from eviscerating performance poet, Daphne Gottlieb, 15 Ways to Stay Alive.  I loved the previous collections Why Things Burn and Final Girl so I’m looking forward to this one.

From Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, a review of Andrea Arnold’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights , a stripped back, radical adaptation of the text which focuses on the otherness of Heathcliff and Cathy. I don’t really think Wuthering Heights is filmable (perhaps Ingmar Bergman might have managed it), but this sounds very interesting.

From Bitch Media, a post about Gloria Anzaldua  and from Elisa Rolle a post about Audre Lorde

Here’s a good one for the lovers of gender theory, the oneline journal Assuming Gender has A Special Issue on bodies. The articles and reviews are free to download as PDFs.

Also for the gender theory geeks, Beyonce songs reimagined as undergraduate gender studies essays

One for the cultural critics, A Blog of Various Philosophical Reflections & Speculations, offers a Lacanian perspective on consumerism, I am not deceived

From Cracked.com (via Bad Reputation), 5 old-timey prejudices that still show up in every movie. Sad but true.

From The Mary Sue, The Future: An Infographic. I love this one – the future as imagined by science fiction films.  It’s interesting to see how many of the envisioned futures are dystopias.  We’re not very optimistic are we?

And, that reminds me, from Zoe Trope we have a follow-up post on the ‘Mary Sue’ which continues her thoughts on the way this term is used against female genre writers, What would Mary Sue do?

From Den of Geek, a look back at one of my favourite Firefly episodes, Out of Gas. I suspect the structure for this episode may have been borrowed from an episode of The West Wing that I saw recently, but one thing I’ll say for Joss Whedon is he does know how to use his sticky fingers to good effect.

From Bitchflicks, a round-up of all the horror movie posts they published over Halloween.  I haven’t got round to reading these yet, so I was quite pleased to see them all gathered in the same place.

Screw Usefulness: Feminism & the Politics of Rereading

The Thursday before last I was having a pretty bad time. Several annoying things happened that day, but I was finally tipped over the edge by reading this review in the New Yorker of a book by Patricia Meyer Spacks entitled On Rereading, which is represented in the review as a book “justifying” the “usefulness” of rereading. Just the idea of this book’s existence enraged me to such an extent that I seethed all the way home and subjected my partner to an incoherent rant about it when I got in.  My immediate response was something along the lines of “What a bunch of nonsense! Wasting perfectly good paper on a ridiculous, made up, middle-class, non problem!”

I’ve now reached the point of being able to explore the source of my anger at this review a little more calmly.  I think I was so infuriated because it summed up a lot of issues around women, class and consumption that have been bugging me more and more as I get older.  Not least among these pet hates is the endless middle-class propensity to make perfectly enjoyable things into a source of stress and misery (especially for women), as well as to create non-problems that make women, especially, feel neurotic. But I also think it made me angry because it put me in touch with some uncomfortable truths.

I’m not going to go into Spacks’s arguments about rereading as described in the review. I have no intention of reading the book and don’t know if the review is a fair representation of what she says in it.  I’m not actually interested in the question of whether rereading is better, I’m interested in the politics of that question and what the very fact of its being asked reveals about classed and gendered discourses around women and consumption. But for the record, my personal stance with regard to rereading amounts to the following: personally, I happen enjoy rereading. I don’t care what you think about my enjoyment of rereading and couldn’t care less whether you reread books or don’t reread books.

So, let’s start with the title of the New Yorker review: “Are Rereadings Better Readings?” Well, why on earth would rereading be ‘better’ than reading a book for the first time? Why would we have to claim that doing the one is “better” than doing the other? Why would we even care? The review is framed by the middle class injunction to attach value judgements to all activities and to promulgate the idea that things are only worth doing if you’re getting something out of them, or if they contribute to the accumulation of status.

Not too surprising for the New Yorker I suppose, but as the review progresses the language becomes far more gendered. It’s stated that Spacks “hopes to justify the usefulness—or at least to solve a bit of the mystery—of an activity that she loves but also, at times, doubts.”  It always infuriates me that women are expected to justify their hobbies as being in some sense “useful”.  Heaven forbid that women not be useful!  And by “useful” I think what they really mean is “virtuous”.  Look at the explosion in the last few years of hobbies aimed particularly at middle-class women with spare time and disposable income, so many of these hobbies are framed/justified in terms of usefulness.  Women can enjoy knitting, if they’re knitting presents for family and friends. Women can enjoy cooking, if they cooking for family and friends or doing it to impress the neighbours, and so on and so forth.

That’s the other thing women are expected to use their hobbies for, to impress people. This seems to be a symptom of the larger injunction that women should worry endlessly about what people think of them, and by “other people”, I think we really mean men and other women who may have power to do us harm.  This terrible worry over what other people think of us as women is something that feminism has made little headway in overcoming – probably because it would require years more consciousness raising and far more mutual support and trust among women than has yet been achieved.  But while this anxiety has been incredibly inhibiting for feminism on many levels, there’s nothing foolish or unreal about it because, for a lot of women, the question of what people think of them as women has direct consequences for their lives, in terms of relationships, jobs, and all sort of things.

I was particularly irritated by the following:

 “perhaps because rereading requires more of a commitment than giving something a second look, it is undertaken, as Spacks puts it, “in the face of guilt-inducing awareness of all the other books that you should have read at least once but haven’t.”  It engages, she fears in her darker moments, a “sinful self-indulgence.”

The language here is highly gendered – guilt, fear, sin, self-indulgence – and all caused by the question of whether or not to read a bloody book more than once!  On one level, I find this heavy-handed language extremely silly, but on the other, it points to the very real anxiety that a lot of women seem to feel about taking a bit of time to themselves, especially if they’re using that time to enjoy an activity that probably isn’t at all useful or virtuous. When encouraging women to take part in activities that can’t be justified in terms of usefulness, advertising often resorts to the language of sin and self-indulgence. You just have to think of all the marketing around chocolate aimed at women.  If a woman can’t claim that some activity is useful, then she’s expected to say that she knows it’s self-indulgent and to claim that she feels guilty about doing it.

It gets on my nerves to say it, but Spacks probably has a point here, though not the one she intended to make, because women are punished for not being “useful”, and have good reason to fear the accusations of selfishness, laziness and self-indulgence that all too often get thrown their way when they want to do things that are entirely for them and no one else.  What really gets to me is that we should be analysing and resisting this mythology rather than buying-into it, as this book appears to do.  With that in mind, last year I picked up a diary in the sales and when I got it home realised that it was a diary for women because, in addition to spaces for the seven days of the week, there was an extra one for “Me Time”.  I was interested to see that “Me Time” existed in this space apparently outside of real time, an entirely mythical space.

Going back to the quote above, why would you feel “guilty” about the unread books on your shelf? Guilt, after all, is a very strong emotion. But of course in middle-class culture there’s a lot of status attached to being “well-read” and (for women) “accomplished”, and there are plenty of real punishments attached to being seen as stupid or poorly educated (read “lower class”). So, is this really the emotion of guilt, or is it actually anxiety, anxiety that is less about reading, and more about class and being seen to be reading the “right way”.  These culturally constructed and gendered neuroses drive me up the wall, no doubt because I’m subject to plenty of them myself.  I mean, how many times a day do I think that I “should” be doing something and feel anxiety because I’m not doing it? Probably more times than I’d like to admit.

I’m also interested in the attitude to consumer culture here, especially the anxiety over consuming in the “right way”.  If you’re rereading a book, you’re failing to consume a new one, which makes you a bad consumer.  But perhaps this can be justified if you can claim there is value in this form of consumption, that it is not in fact useless, that it increases self-knowledge, or whatever.

For me, this book review manages to compress some of the gendered injunctions of late capitalism: be useful, be virtuous, justify yourself, worry about other people think of you, consume, but consume in the right way.

To which I would say, screw usefulness, screw virtue, screw self-justification, screw worry over what other people think of you and screw consumer culture.

Easier said than done I know.

Soundtrack to October

A bit late with this post … October was fairly shitty , but since shitty months tend to mean more listening to music, it’s not all bad.

I’m a bit seasonal about music, so now that it’s gettting colder and darker, I’m playing more of the artists that I associate with the winter months.  This usually means a lot of folk and americana.  Johnny Cash always heralds the beginning of winter for me.  I’ve been listening to his Murder anthology, which I think is the best of the ‘Love, God Murder‘ set.  There are not many tracks I find more moving than his cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’.  There was also the wonderful American III: Solitary Man (2000) and ‘Who’s Gonna Cry’ the first disc in the monumental posthumous collection, Unearthed (2003).

There’s been a fair bit of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy too, especially I See a Darkness (1999) and The Letting Go (2006), which are probably my two favourite albums from BPB, the first is a dark, understated masterpiece which hooked me onto Will Oldham, and the second, a chilly affair recorded in Iceland and featuring some beautiful melodies and vocal harmonies.  Also in the folk vein, the Cowboy Junkies’s Trinity Session (1987) got an airing and Gillian Welch’s first album, Revival (1996), which astounds me every time.  I cannot wait to see her live later this month.  And from a Britain, we had a listen to Fairport Convention’s Leige and Lief (1969).

Leonard Cohen is another winter staple, and I’ve been listening to the early albums Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) (agreed with some twitter friends that we especially like the bit at the end of ‘One of us cannot be wrong’ where he sounds like he’s being dragged screaming away from the mic) and Songs from a Room (1969).  I’m glad to say my partner finally seems to be coming around to Cohen. I’ve been using the same  approach that I took (with success) in relation to olives, that of  just keeping up the exposure until she gives in.

In terms of woman in rock, I listened to Patti Smith’s cover album Twelve (2007), Kate Bush’s shimmering Hounds of Love (1985) and, in preparation for last week’s gig, the swirling rage of Throwng Muses Hunkpapa (1989).

Tracks of the Month -  with links to You Tube videos

Johnny Cash, Highway Patrolman (the bit where he sings ‘And I hit the lights’ gives me chills down the spine everytime)
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Black
Cowboy Junkies, Sweet Jane
Gillian Welch, Orphan Girl
Fairport Convention, Crazy Man Michael  and I just came across this live version by Natalie Merchant
Leonard Cohen, The Stranger Song (live on the Julie Felix show in 1967)
Patti Smith, Smells like teen spirit
Kate Bush, Hounds of Love (Official video – always fun!)

And finally, Throwing Muses performing ‘Mania’ live in 1988, supported by The Pixies apparently – can you imagine that gig?!

Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976)

Finding themselves faced with economic and environmental collapse on a global scale, a wealthy extended family seeks refuge in the mountains, where they hope to survive and build a new community.  When they realise that radiation and pollution have lead to high levels of infertility, they resort to using their DNA to create clones who they intend to raise as their own children with the hope that they will be able to reproduce sexually again at some point in the future.  However, as the clones grow up, it becomes apparent that they represent a different species of human and have their own ideas about how the community should develop. As you may have already guessed, it doesn’t involve returning to the old ways.

The story is told in three parts, the first mainly from the point of view of David, a young scientist involved in the cloning of the new humans. The second part is set an unstated number of years later and follows the consequences of the clone community’s decision to send an expedition out to the old cities.  One of the consequences of this expedition is the birth of a boy called Mark, the natural child of two of the clones who came back “different”, who is the focus of the third, and probably most successful part of the novel.  The disruptive effect of Mark’s presence on the now ailing clone community and his ambivalent relationship with his father’s cloned ‘brothers’ made for the most compelling part of the story, I thought.

If you’re fussy about your world-building and use of science, then this novel will probably aggravate the heck out of you because it requires a massive suspension of disbelief and you could drive a truck through some of the plot holes. For example, the family seems to have unlimited economic resources and rather fortunately includes some Nobel standard scientific geniuses who are able to make a success out of human cloning in one generation. Wilhelm tells us very little about the science involved in achieving this.  We also have to believe that these people are the only survivors of the global catastrophe, which seems a little unlikely when you think about it.  What’s more, the prose is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair.  At times, the writing is evocative and lyrical, but at others it’s dull and plodding. The story is heavily plot driven and I can’t say I cared that much about the characters, though the plot certainly did keep me reading.

However, if you’re more interested in science fiction as allegory, prepared to overlook the scientific details, and enjoy reading books which, while they haven’t dated all that well, have influenced the development of the genre, then you might like to give it a go.  It certainly seems to be an influence on post-apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction, such as Octavia E. Butler’s far superior Parable of the Sower.  Some of the better bits also reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, speculative fictions – the keeping of fertile women as “breeders” of babies to produce more DNA for new clones, for instance. The better writing is atmospheric and genuinely frightening, especially when Wilhelm writes about nature and the parts where characters visit the ruined cities. One of my favourite parts was Mark’s lone excursion into the wastelands by river in the third section.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang also interested me very much as novel of its time and in this respect I’m not surprised it won the 1977 Hugo Award and was nominated for the Nebula in 1976. It’s easy to make fun of this novel and forget now (though we really shouldn’t) just how genuinely frightened people were in the 1970s of nuclear war and the possibility of environmental collapse. You can imagine the women of Greenham Common Peace Camp nodding along to Wilhelm’s bleak prophecies. My own parents actually upped’ sticks and moved to an isolated part of Wales partly in response to these kinds of fears (I once asked my mother if she’d considered whether dying slowly of starvation and radiation poisoning would be better than going out quickly in the first flash and she said they “didn’t think about that”). But the idea that my parents, and many people like them, had of creating a more sustainable, lower tech society is very much in line with Wilhelm’s conclusion here, although presumably without the clones.  And sometimes I think we could use a bit more of that fear these days.

In its way, I would agree with the view that this is a classic of the genre, but overall I’d say it’s one for people with a particular interest in post-apocalyptic science fiction and the history of the genre.  I don’t think it would convert anyone to science fiction.