What I Read and Watched in 2023

A happy and healthy New Year to you and yours! I hope you have had a joyful and wide-ranging year of reading, whatever that means in your particular circumstances.

For the past four years, I've kept a running list of books I've finished over the course of the year. Previous lists can find found at the following links:

• 2022
  
• 2021 
• 2020
  

In 2023 I read 123 books...

Out of all of those books, there are a few that particularly stood out to me, which I would enthusiastically encourage you to check out. Part of the fun of recommending books is the connection it can create with another reader, so if you do read or listen something below and enjoy it, I'd love to hear about it!

My Recommendations 

1. Short Stories: "The Curfew Tolls," by Stephen Vincent Benét (which I read in 50 Great Short Stories, edited by Milton Crane); "The Girl of My Dreams" by Bernard Malamud (which I read in an edition of The Magic Barrel), "Sad, Dark Thing" by Michael Marshall Smith (which I read in Ghost, edited by Louise Welsh) at the end of which I whistled and swore softly at the perfect final twist and emotional devastation it left; "Click-Clack the Rattlebag" by Neil Gaiman (in his collection Trigger Warning); "Dinner of the Dead Alumni" by Adam Marek (another story from Ghost), which is deeply off-colour and blackly, disturbingly funny. Finally, "The Mad Lomasneys" by Frank O'Connor (I read it in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story), with its tragicomic love story, deftly sketched characters, and impossibly perfect dialogue, is terrific fun.
2. Children's and Young Adult: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles hold up to re-reading as an adult, and I loved getting to know the work of Holly Black and Leigh Bardugo.
   
3. Romance: Alexis Hall's work does not always land for me but when they do, they really, really do. Glitterland is a gem.
4. Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2023 was a standout year for my reading (and re-reading) in this genre. So many good books! Reaper Man and The Truth were a glorious introduction to Terry Pratchett. (Sharp and funny--read them both!) Ordinary Monsters is a sprawling, atmospheric Victorian fantasy. From the rereading department, the Paksworld books by Elizabeth Moon were just as diverting and delightful as I remembered them being, and Sharon Shinn's Samaria books continue to be comfort reading.
   
5. Nonfiction: I received a copy of What an Owl Knows for Christmas, gulped it down whole, and proceeded to pepper my family with owl facts for the next five days.
   
6. Dishonorable mention: In general, I figure that a book that wasn't to my taste will be to someone else's, live and let live. But. I so deeply, passionately disliked Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh, that it earns my first dishonorable mention in four years of writing these posts. It's a well-crafted and totally vile book, set in a medieval fantasy world that plays up all the stereotypes of that world that scholars work so hard to replace with colour and nuance and life.
7. Podcasts:  You gotta listen to Alabama Astronaut, a riveting exploration of the music played in American serpent handling (signs following) churches. Really. Yes, the religion is something I (to put it politely) do not understand, but the music is electric, and the compassion and curiosity with which Abe Partridge and Ferrill Gibbs approach the people and places they come to know gives me hope for a better world.
   
8. On the silver screen:  Good Omens Season 2! Good Omens Season 2! I really can't say enough about how much I adored the second season of that show. And its beautiful, devastating ending. Broadchurch is insanely well-crafted, and Olivia Coleman and David Tennant play off each other delightfully. Diego Luna joins Coleman, Tenannt, and Toby Stephens as an actor whose craft I watch with awe and delight. Andor is incredible.
   

Reading

Fiction

 

Anthologies and Short Stories

1. Parallel Hells by Leon Craig 
2. 50 Great Short Stories, edited by Milton Crane  
3. Trigger Warning: Short Fictions & Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
   
4. The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud
   
5. Ghost: 100 Stories to Read with the Lights On, edited by Louise Welsh
6. The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story edited by Anne Enright 

Children's Book and Young Adult

1. Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones
2. Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones
3. The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope (reread)
4. Fire and Hemlock by Dianna Wynne Jones (reread)
5. Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (reread)
6. Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (reread)
7. Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (reread)
8. Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (reread)
9. Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer (reread)
10. Conrad's Fate by Diana Wynne Jones
    
11. The Cruel Prince by Holly Black (reread)
12. The Wicked King by Holly Black
13. Queen of Nothing by Holly Black
14. How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories by Holly Black
15. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
16. Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
17. King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo
    

Historical Fiction

1. Prize for the Fire by Rilla Askew
   

Literary Fiction

1. Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh
   

Mystery

1. The Sanctuary Sparrow by Ellis Peters
2. The Raven in the Foregate by Ellis Peters
   

Poetry

1. What it is by Esther Jansma
2. The Poetry of Ennodius translated by Brett Milligan
3. Frost on the window and other poems by Mary Stewart
4. William Cowper: Selected Poems, edited by Nick Rhodes
5. Rochester, selected by Ronald Duncan
6. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Completed Poems, edited by Edward Connery Latham
7. Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor
   

Romance

1. Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloise James
   
2. Neon Gods by Katee Robert
3. Electric Idol by Katee Robert
4. Wicked Beauty by Katee Robert
5. Radiant Sin by Katee Robert 
6. For Real by Alexis Hall
7. Pansies by Alexis Hall
8. If Only You by Chloe Liese 
9. Goodbye Paradise by Sarina Bowen
   
10. The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas (reread)
    
11. The American Roommate Experiment by Elena Armas (reread)
12.  Just Like Heaven by Julia Quinn (reread)
13. The Sum of All Kisses by Julia Quinn (reread)
14. Happy Place by Emily Henry
15. Beach Read by Emily Henry (reread) 
16. Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood
17. An Unnatural Vice by KJ Charles
    
18.  An Unsuitable Heir by KJ Charles
19. An Unseen Attraction by KJ Charles 
20. Better Hate Than Never by Chloe Liese
21. The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by KJ Charles
22. The Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles
23. 10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall 
24. Glitterland by Alexis Hall  
25. Beyond Pain by Kit Rocha (reread) 
26. Sorry, Bro by Taleen Voskuni
27. Fumbled by Alexa Martin (reread) 
28. A Scot in the Dark by Sarah McLean (reread) 

Science Fiction and Fantasy

1. Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro
2. Archangel by Sharon Shinn (reread)
3. Jovah's Angel by Sharon Shinn (reread)
4. The Alleluia Files by Sharon Shinn (reread)
5. Angelica by Sharon Shinn (reread)
6. Angel Seeker by Sharon Shinn
7. The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin
8. A River Enchanted by  Rebecca Ross
9. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
10. The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
11. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
12. Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell (reread)
13. Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell
14. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold (reread)
    
15. Embers of War by Gareth Powell
16. Angel Mage by Garth Nix
    
17. The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard
18. In Acension by Martin MacInnes
    
19. To be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers
20. Printer's Devil Court by Susan Hill
21. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
22. The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris 
23. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett (reread)
    
24. Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
    
25. Divided Allegiance by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
26. Oath of Gold by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
27. Oath of Fealty by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
28. Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
29. Echoes of Betrayal by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
30. Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
31. Crown of Renewal by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
32. Surrender None by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
33. Liar's Oath by Elizabeth Moon (reread)
34. Angelica by Sharon Shinn (second reread)
35. Angel Seeker by Sharon Shinn (reread)
36. Archangel by Sharon Shinn (second reread)
37. Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett 
38. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
39. Sealskin by Su Bristow
40. The Truth by Terry Pratchett
41. Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs (reread)
42. Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs (reread)
    

Nonfiction 

Advice

1.  Overcoming social anxiety and shyness : a self-help guide to using cognitive behavioural techniques by Gillian Butler
2.  How to be a person in the world: Ask Polly's guide through the paradoxes of modern life by Heather Havrilesky

Autobiography, Biography, and Memoir

1. Memories by Lucy Boston
   

Cookbooks 

1. New England Open House Cookbook by Sarah Leah Chase
2. The Woks of Life by Bill, Judy, Sarah, and Kaitlin Leung
3. Natural by Love Food
4. Summer Kitchens by Olia Hercules
   
5. Indian Slow Cooker by Neela Paniz
6. The Slow Cooker Bible by Sara Lewis, Saskia Sidey, and Libby Silberman
7. I Dream of Dinner (So You Don't Have To) by Ali Slagle
   

Essays

1. A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett
   

Gardening and Nature Writing

1. What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman
   

History 

1. Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyams
2. The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcom Gaskill
3. The Illustrated History of Football by David Squires
4. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy
   

Travel

1. A textile traveler's guide to Guatemala by Deborah Chandler 
2. Utrecht: Sights and secrets of Holland's smartest city by Anika Redhed

Writing

1.  About Writing by Gareth Powell
   

Viewing and Listening

Movies

1. Star Wars: Episode 4 - A New Hope (1977)
2. Star Wars: Episode 5 - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
3. Star Wars: Episode 6 - Return of the Jedi (1983)
4. Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace (1999)
5. Star Wars: Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones (2002)
6. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2003-2005)
7. Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith (2005)
8. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) (rewatch)
   
9. Captain America: the Winter Soldier (2014) (rewatch)
   
10. Much Ado About Nothing (2011)
11. John Wick (2014)
12. John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
13. John Wick: Chapter 3--Parabellum (2019)
14. John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
15. Mission: Impossible (1996) (watched twice, on two separate flights)
    
16. 65 (2023)
    
17. Die Hard (1988) (rewatch)
    
18. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
    

Podcasts

1. Alabama Astronaut
2. Ali on the Run
3. Nobody Asked Us (with Des and Kara)
   

TV Shows

1. Shadow and Bone (Season 2)
   
2. The Expanse (Seasons 1-6)
3. Bridgerton (Season 2)
   
4. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
5. Andor (Season 1) 
6. Obi Wan Kenobi
   
7. Good Omens (Season 2)
8. Heartstopper (Season 2)
   
9. Salvation (Seasons 1-partway through Season 2)
   
10. Agents of Shield (Seasons 1- 3 ongoing)
11. Loki (Seasons 1-2)
12. Lost in Space (season 1 ongoing)
13. Manifest (Seasons 1-3, ongoing)
    
14. Broadchurch (Seasons 1-3)
    
15. Foyle's War (Season 1-4, ongoing)
16. Castle (Seasons 1-2, in the midst of season 3)
    

Youtube

1. Vlogbrothers (the brothers Green)
   
2. Run and Stretch (running warmups and cooldowns)
   
3. Paola La (figure skating commentary)
4. Full of Lit (book and TV reviews)
   

Myths of Weaving: Writing About Textiles in Ancient and Late Antique Literature

My special treat this winter vacation is to finish writing a series of posts about books* I read in the 2022-2023 academic year. That was full year and blogging took a backseat to my many other adventures. As I continue to settle into postdoc life, I'm hoping to keep using this blog as a commonplace book for my academic and creative life. I greatly enjoy the writing I do here and hope to continue it into a brave new year!

One of the books I finished last year was Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins. At the time I was reading it, September to December 2022, I was beginning to work on the use of textile metaphors in late antique literature for two conference papers that have since become two book chapters. Hence, references to textile production snagged my attention even when reading books for fun. Making textiles provides a through-thread for Higgins' retelling of Greek myths, and the passage of the introduction where she explains this is worth quoting in full:

'Running through Greek and Roman thought is a persistent connection between the written word and woven thread, between text and textile. The Latin verb texere, from which the English words text and textile derive, means to weave, or compose, or to fit a complex structure together. Textum means fabric, or framework, or even, in certain branches of materialist philosophy, atomic structure. The universe itself is sometimes describes as a kind of fabric: Lucretius, in his first-century BCE scientific poem On the Nature of the Universe, describes the Earth, sea and sky as three dissimilar elements that are texta, woven together. Texere is related to the Greek verb tikto, which means to engender, to bring about, to produce, to give birth to. In turn the Latin and Greek words are related to the Sanskrit takman, child, and taksh, to make or to weave. Greek and Roman literature is full of metaphors that compare its own creation to spinning and weaving...My book reassess the connectedness of all of this: text and textile, the universe, the production of ideas, the telling of stories, and the delicate filaments of human life. These are the lives that are so cunningly and ruthlessly manipulated by the Fates, the all-powerful ancient goddesses who spin, wind and finally cut the thread of each person's existence.' pp 12-13

There's a passage in one of my book chapters in progress where I attempt to sketch the backstory of the relationship between texts and textiles; I admire the economy and elegance of Higgins' summary here. Before the eighteenth century, when new technologies of weaving (the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny) were invented, producing and processing fibre to make textiles required immense amounts of time and effort.

'...the lives of most women, and many men, were dominated by the slow, laborious processes required to make cloth. Partly because few examples have survived from the classical world, and partly because they were long overlooked as mere 'women's work', textiles have only fairly recently taken off as the object of serious study. Now, though, they are being investigated in all of their aspects---sociological, economic, archaeological, literary, metaphorical, mathematical--and rightly seen as central to live in the ancient world.' p. 11

Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins

I'm lucky to be writing my chapters about textiles at a time when this field of research is growing in so many directions. As I was formatting the bibliography for "Has geminas artes: text and textiles in the world of Attusia Lucana Sabina," earlier this month, I was struck by the sheer range of work I was citing: archaeology, experimental archaeology, literary studies, and more! It was particularly exciting to read about scholars' and weavers' attempts to reproduce ancient textiles as a way to learn more about how the techniques and time commitment involved in making them. Such scholarship challenges old assumptions about the complexity of ancient textiles.

'Despite the fact that textiles survivals from the ancient world are so sparse, there are plenty of indications that real, non-mythical cloth could be woven with complex designs--most notably the textile annually offered in Athens to the sculpture of Athena Polias, which was said to have depicted the gods' battles with the giants...Scholars long believed this kind of complicated pattern would have been impossible to create on so simple a device as a warp-weighted loom--but it is perfectly possible.' p. 12

Greek Myths: A New Retelling uses the ancient literary device of ekphrasis--a literary description of a physical work of art--as the roving from which to spin accounts of the stories of eight women of Greek myth--Athena, Alcithoë, Philomela, Arachne, Andromeda, Helen, Circe, and Penelope. Weaving features prominently in each of their stories, and description of the textiles they are making is an ingenious framing device. Each story opens with a line drawing by Chris Ofili, which enhance the text beautifully. For a unique and lovely introduction or reintroduction to Greek myth, this is a book to seek out and enjoy.

Further Reading

The notes and bibliography provide an excellent source of further reading. I bookmarked several scholars, publications, and projects to explore more thoroughly. Some I have since encountered in my research over the past year and some I look forward to digging into in 2024 and beyond.

 

Scholars and Projects

• Professor Mary Harlow (Wikipedia) (Archaeological Textiles Review)
  
• Dr Ellen Harlizius-Klück (Academia.edu)
• The Penelope Project  at the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science at the Deutsches Museum, Munich (Project Publications on Zenodo)

Books and Poems

• Elizabeth Ward Barber (1996), Women's Word: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times 
• Fiona Benson, [transformation: Callisto] (a poem about the Callisto myth, found in Benson's collection Vertigo & Ghost (2019), reviewed by Colin Burrows in the London Review of Books here)
• E. Karslus and G. Fanfani, (eds). Homo Textor: Weaving as a Technical Mode of Existence (forthcoming, Munich; publication date is given on one contributor's faculty page as 2022)
  
• Carol Helibrun (1985), What was Penelope Unweaving? in Hamlet's Mother and Other Women: Feminist Essays in Literature. There's apparently a great quote that talks about weaving and women's language and story
• Theocritus, Idyll 15, which describes a textile at the festival of Adonis, where there are 'tapestries so marvellous that the figures depicted on them seem to move' p. 286
• The Illiad and the Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. I'm particularly interested in reading Wilson's translation of Illiad 22, which is the scene when Andromache learns the news of her husband Hector's death. As Higgins puts it: 'When she realises what has happened, she rips off her headdress and drops her shuttle: one of the great devastating moments in literature.' (p. 285) 

*These include Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam, The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, and The Gates of Europe: A New History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, not necessarily in that order.

They were memories

As a historian, I most often work with texts, especially letters. But the past is present in the rest of my life through objects. My grandmother, who died before I was born, was an antiques dealer and collector, and many of her things, and their stories, passed down to my mother, who has an extraordinary visual memory. The question "where did this come from?" is the key to the stories she keeps; it gives access to people and places I will never know. This background makes me readily believe that objects can serve as vessels of memory. 

Recently, I was delighted by a scene in "Summer Nights", a short story by Elizabeth Bowen, where the keepsakes of one of the story's minor characters, Aunt Fran, are described:

Round the room, on the ledges and brackets, stood the fetishes she had traveled through life with. They were memories--photos in little warped frames, musty, round straw boxes, china kittens, palm crosses, three Japanese monkeys, bambini, a Lincoln Imp, a merry-thought pen-wiper, an ivory spinning wheel from Cologne. From these objects the original virtue had by now almost evaporated. These gifts' givers, known on her lonely journey, were by now as faint as their photographs: she no longer knew, now, where anyone was. All the more, her nature clung to these objects that moved with her slowly towards the dark.

Elizabeth Bowen, "Summer Night, " reprinted in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, edited by Ann Enright, (London, 2010), pp. 78-9

Imagining this as a gathering of what a shop sign would call "antiques and collectibles", I began to wonder what these objects might look like. "Summer Night" was published in 1941, and Aunt Fran is described as an old lady, so I used the word Victorian in my image searches.

photos in little warped frames: I enjoyed looking at lots of elaborate Victorian photo frames on ebay but chose this very simple example; the adjectives "little" and "warped" suggest something not very elaborate.

Image source: ebay.com

 

 

 

 

 

musty, round straw boxes: The straw box below isn't the right shape but it was surprisingly tricky to find examples of Victorian straw work. The example below so pretty--I wonder if the decoration technique might be a form of straw marquetry? "Musty", does, however, suggest a little trinket box made entirely out of straw. Decorated wood, like the box below, would likely be sturdier.

Image source: Rubylane

 

china kittens: There are, as anyone who has gone into an antique store knows, a lot of cat figurines in this old world. With boxes still on my mind, I thought this was an utterly charming examples of china kittens.

Image source: etsy.com

palm crosses: Given the tone of the passage and the other keepsakes on Aunt Fran's shelves, I imagine these being kept as mementos of time spent with loved ones, as well as for their value as religious objects. Passages of the Bible which describe the arrival of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, shortly before his execution, mention that the crowds which accompanied him and his disciples were carrying palm branches. Palm Sunday, the commemoration of this event in the Christian religious calendar, is celebrated on the Sunday before Easter; many churches include a procession with palms in their celebrations. These palms are often made into crosses and kept until the church service that marks the start of Lent.

"Good Friday: Palm Cross" by Dai Lygad is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

three Japanese monkeys: While the story doesn't say, enough of my searches for "Victorian Japanese monkeys" came back with these "speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil" monkeys that I thought Aunt Fran's figurine was probably similar.

Image source: ebay.com

bambini: Dear reader, do you know what this would be? I know that bambini is the Italian word for "babies," but Google searches for terms like "Victorian bambini" were useless. Websites like ebay, which have lots of antiques for sale, didn't seem to have items specifically listed under this term either. Suspecting that bambini is a word, like putti, which refers to something specific, I looked it up in the dictionary. Bambini is "a representation of the infant Christ." Most of the images I was able to find were described by their sellers as figurines from nativity scenes. Here's one example. Again, the presence of this object this suggests both religiosity and the social side of religious observance. If Aunt Fran's figurine was a baby Jesus from a manger scene, it may have reminded her of decorating for the holidays with members of her family.

Image source: ebay.com

a Lincoln Imp: As a former resident of Lincoln, I was charmed to see its famous gargoyle among Aunt Fran's collectibles. Most Lincoln Imps seem to have been in the form of teaspoons or door knockers. After scanning several pages of search results, I came across this charming little paperweight, who looks like the sort of thing one might keep on a ledge or bracket as a memento. I wouldn't have though them especially common in Ireland (or indeed, outside of Lincoln), so its presence suggests a traveling friend or relative.

Lincoln Imp Paperweight (Image source: ebay.com)

Merry-thought penwiper: At first I thought that 'merry-thought' was simply an adjective, and the object could have been any sort of penwiper (perhaps this astonishingly cute cat-shaped one?) But no, the full phrase is a proper noun! The merry-thought pen wiper is a doll made from a wishbone, used as a pen-wiper; the Cambridge Public Library features newspaper instructions on how to make one here and the blog Victorian traditions has a delightful selection of pictures of them here. Something to do with the wishbone of your Christmas turkey, perhaps?

Lastly, the ivory spinning wheel from Cologne! This was another object that I struggled to identify. Why is it significant that the ivory spinning wheel is from Cologne? My searches turned up many examples of carved ivory from medieval Cologne, but almost no information on ivory carving in nineteenth or twentieth century Cologne. However, the German town of Erbach was and is a centre for ivory carving; it even has a museum with examples of ivory carving from around the world. Being absolutely exact, the auction house which sold the little ivory spinning wheel below concluded it was made in France or Flanders, not Germany, but it is too charming not to share.

Image source: Bonhams.com

A character's things and how they feel about them are so evocative, aren't they? Aunt Fran is, for the other characters in "Summer Night", unsympathetic and irritating. As a reader, her attachment to her shelves full of treasures and the memories they hold caught my attention. Thinking about these objects, where they came from, and what they looked like, enriches my understanding of Aunt Fran's character by hinting that she once had a wide circle of friends and family, who went with her to church, and  traveled--to Germany, England, Japan--and brought her back gifts. The gifts' givers are dead, estranged, or out of touch, but their memories remain.

The full text of Look at all these roses, the short story collection where "Summer Night" was originally published, can be found on the Internet Archive here.

Dreams that would split the brain of Caesar

Curating an anthology is a skill that fascinates me (as I've written before). While I enjoy collections of poems or short stories written by a single person, I love the element of surprise that a good anthology provides. In older anthologies editorial intervention is often delightfully discreet --while there may be short foreword explaining what materials have been selected and why, there are no explanatory notes or biographies of authors. The stories are left to speak for themselves.

Which is to say--if you run across a copy of the anthology 50 Great Short Stories, edited by an American professor of English, Milton Crane (1917-1985), pick it up and read it. Crane's tastes are old-fashioned: most of the stories he selected were written before the Second World War; and the majority of them are by British or American men. Nine of the fifty stories are by women, which seems like a pretty good proportion for a collection originally published in the 1950s.

The fact that the stories in this anthology are the sorts of stories that were popular in a bygone age makes 50 Great American Short Stories a wonderful book for encountering the work of writers whose work has fallen out of fashion in the twenty-first century. Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) seems to be one such; in his own day he was a best-selling and prizewinning poet. I have a vague memory of encountering his most famous short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster," in one of my many happy hours browsing the Norton Anthology of Literature during my high school English classes, but the author's name hadn't stuck in my memory.

Benét's short story "The Curfew Tolls," was one of my favourite finds in this collection. The frame of the story is a series of letters by a retired British general, Estcourt, sent to the coastal watering place of St. Philippe-des-Bains to recover his health in 1788. (Why the dates of the letters matter is revealed over the course of the story.)

The 1983 edition of 50 Great Short Stories (originally published in 1959).

The story's epistolary frame is the perfect vehicle for long, chatty descriptions of people, places, and conversations. As narrator, Estcourt is determined to amuse himself, and his sister Harriet, with whom he is corresponding, by finding and befriending characters among the locals. The chief among these is an officer, retired from the French army, whose contradictions puzzle and fascinate him. Witness one of their conversations:

"And what is treason?" he said lightly. "If we call it unsuccessful ambition we shall be nearer the truth. He looked at me, keenly. "You are shocked, General Estcourt," he said. "I am sorry for that. But have you never known the curse"--and here his voice vibrated--"the curse of not being employed when you should be employed? The curse of being a hammer with no nail to drive? The curse--the curse of sitting in a dusty garrison town with dreams that would split the brain of Caesar and no room on earth for those dreams?"

"Yes," I said, unwillingly, for there was something in him that demanded the truth. "I have known that."

- Stephen Vincent Benét, 'The Curfew Tolls", in 50 Great Short Stories, ed. Milton Crane, p. 306

Their frustrated ambitions and shared passion for military strategy provide the foundations for an odd sort of friendship, which deepens when Estcourt meets the officer's large and disreputable family. I particularly love Benét's description of the redoubtable family matriarch:

Only the old lady remained aloof, saying little and sipping her camomile tea as though it contained the blood of her enemies. - Stephen Vincent Benét, 'The Curfew Tolls", in 50 Great Short Stories, ed. Milton Crane, p. 309.

The officer's name is not revealed until the very end of the story, but clues to his identity are given throughout, including in his dramatic deathbed speech:

"Risen?" he said, and his eyes flashed. "Risen? Oh, God, that I should die alone with my one companion an Englishman with a soul of suet! Fool, if I had had Alexander's chance, I would have bettered Alexander! And it will come, too, that is the worst of it. Already Europe is shaking with a new birth. If I had been born under the Sun-King, I would be a Marshall of France; if I had been born twenty years ago, I would mold a new Europe with my fists in the next half-dozen years. Why did they put my soul in my body at this infernal time. Do you not understand, imbecile? Is there no one who understands?" - Stephen Vincent Benét, 'The Curfew Tolls", in 50 Great Short Stories, ed. Milton Crane p. 312.

It wasn't until the final paragraphs that I realized why the lack of a name mattered, and this twist made for a reading experience I would recommend. 

"The Curfew Tolls" can be read online here.

If You Read Enough Books, You Overflow

One of the last books I checked out of the Lincoln Central Library before I moved away was Terry Prachett's A Slip of the Keyboard. Pratchett is one of those authors who has been on edges of my awareness for awhile--I was given a copy of Good Omens over a decade ago, and loved it (I could also go on, at length, about how much I adore the television show), but I hadn't stumbled into reading any of his other writings. 

A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett

A Slip of the Keyboard changed that. It was, of course, helpful that I found it exactly at the right time--anthologies with short chapters are good for moving, or times of upheaval in general, because you can pick them up and put them down without losing the plot. The book collects Pratchett's essays, speeches, and other non-fiction pieces. It is full of delightful moments. Consider this reflection on his experiences at the start of his career:

I was lucky. Incredibly so, when I think of all the ways things could have gone. But when the floppy-eared Spaniel of Luck sniffs at your turn-ups it helps if you have a collar and a piece of string in your pocket. In my case, it was a sequel. (p. 21)

I can picture the Spaniel of Luck, can't you? It's probably the type of dog who gets excited and beats a tattoo with its tail. Neil Gaiman's introduction reflects beautifully on the contrast between Pratchett's image as a jolly funnyman and the outrage against injustice that drives much of his work. Outrage aside, moments of exasperation are among the delights of these pieces. One of my favourites is his pithy comment on the internet:

The ethos of the internet was evolved by people who did not have to pay their own phone bills. (p. 79)

But there's also his comment on the rebranding of librarianship:

Not long ago I was invited to a librarians' event by a lady who cheerfully told me, 'We like to think of ourselves as information providers.' I was appalled by this want of ambition: I made my excuses and didn't go. After all, if you have a choice, why not call yourselves Shining Acolytes of the Sacred Flame of Literacy in a Dark and Encroaching Universe? I admit this is hard to put on a button, so why no abbreviate it to librarians?....It seemed to me, even in those days, that librarians and their ilk were not mere 'providers.' (p. 143)

This is part of a passage describing his experience working as a volunteer librarian. I like his point that librarians do more than simply provide access to information, they help people navigate it. (I also think he's on to something about the way that information professionals can often struggle to "TAKE UP SPACE", as my middle school violin teacher would memorably shout at me when I slouched.)

Another passage I want to copy out and wave at everyone I know (the point of this post, if there is one), comes from his inaugural lecture as a professor at Trinity College, Dublin. It's a passage I want to put in a course handbook one day:

Vice-chancellor, venerable staff, guests, students, and graduates, I hope that no one will take it amiss when I say that what we are in fact doing today is celebrating ignorance. Ignorance is generally an unregarded talent among humans, but we are in fact the only species that knows how to do it properly. We've got where we are today by starting out ignorant. It wasn't always like this. A few thousand years ago, we knew everything--how the world began, what it was for, our place in it...everything. It was all there, in the stories the old men told around the fire or had written down in a big book. No more questions, everything sorted out. But now we now that there's vast amounts of things that, well, we simply don't know, Universities have made great efforts in this area. Think about how it works: you arrive at university, the gleam still on your A-levels, and you've pretty well got it all sussed. Then the first thing they tell you--well, the second thing, obviously, because they have to tell you where the toilets are and so on--is that what you've learned so far is not so much the truth as it is a way of looking at things. And after three years or so you've learned that there's a huge amount you don't know yet, and that's when they give you a scroll and push you out. Ignorance is a wonderful thing--it's the state you have to be in before you can really learn anything. (p. 149)

It's not quite correct--as a medievalist, I take issue with the idea that rigid, patriarchal certainty about the way the world works (or should work), is a thing of the past--it seems to be doing very well for itself in the twenty-first century. But the real point, that one of the outcomes of becoming truly educated is realizing with wonder and humility just how infinitely much there is to learn--is something I hope to convey in my own teaching.

Some of the loveliest moments in the book are when Pratchett reflects on his own development as a writer. I love his account of writing a fan letter to Tolkien and getting a response back.

...when I was young, I wrote a letter to J.R.R. Tolkien, just as he was becoming extravagantly famous. I think the book that impressed me was Smith of Wotton Major. Mine must have been among hundreds or thousands of letters he received every week. I got a reply. It might have been dictated. For all I know, it might have been typed to a format. But it was signed. He must have had a sackful of letters from every commune and university in the world, written by people whose children are now grown up and trying to make a normal life while being named Galadriel or Moonchild. It wasn't as if I'd said a lot. There were no burning questions. I just said I'd enjoyed the book. And he said thank you. For a moment, it achieved the most basic and treasured of human communications: you are real, and therefore so am I. (p. 76)

Writers on the craft of writing can be a bit hit or miss, and a secondary industry to the writing advice industry is the don't-take-that-writing-advice-industry, where people explain their allergies to old chestnuts such as "write every day". A Slip of the Keyboard is not a book of advice, but I found this passage especially useful.

Read with the eye of a carpenter looking at trees. Apply logic in places where it  wasn't intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn't everyone using it? What rules will you have to give to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works. (p. 85)

And lastly, in a book stuffed with great one-liners, this is among the book's best:

And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer. (p. 126)

Inspired by A Slip of the Keyboard, one of the first books I checked out from my new public library, de Bibliotheek Utrecht, was their extremely battered copy of Reaper Man, which I loved. I'm currently testing the integrity of the tape binding holding together their copy of The Truth. There is more Terry Pratchett in my future. May we all read to overflow in what remains of this year and the ones to come, and thanks to Sir Terry for helping us do it.

Invent Your Way Out

Here's a thing: I trust the label "classic." So when I saw the red spine of Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel, a collection of short stories first published in 1958, and republished in Penguin's Vintage Classics series in 2002, I happily plucked it off the library shelf and brought it home with me. Malamud is a very famous American writer, with a major short-story writing award named after him, but I had never heard of him.

The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

Discovering his stories was marvelous fun, not least because they are well-crafted and wise. Take, as a delightful example, this conversation about writing between the two characters of "The Girl of My Dreams":

Olga reached into her market bag and brought out several packages. She unwrapped bread, sausage, herring, Italian cheese, soft salami, pickles and a large turkey drumstick. 

 'Sometimes I favor myself with these little treats. Eat, Mitka.'

Another landlady. Set Mitka adrift, and he enticed somebody's Mama. But he ate, grateful she had provided an occupation.

The waiter brought the drinks. 'What's going on here, a picnic?'

'We're writers,' Olga explained.

'The boss will be pleased.'

'Never mind him, eat, Mitka.'

He ate listlessly. A man had to live. Or did he? When had felt this low? Probably never.

Olga sipped her whiskey. 'Eat, it's self-expression.'

He expressed himself by finishing off the salami, also half the loaf of bread, cheese, and herring. His appetite grew. Searching within the bag Olga brought out a package of sliced corned beef and a ripe pear. He made a sandwich of the meat. On top of that the cold beer was tasty.

'How is the writing going now, Mitka?'

He lowered the glass but changed his mind and gulped the rest.

'Don't speak of it.'

'Be uphearted, not down. Work every day.'

He gnawed the turkey drumstick.

'That's what I do. I've been writing for over twenty years and sometimes--for one reason or another--it gets so bad that I don't feel like going on. But what I do then is relax for a short while and then change to another story. After my juices are flowing again I go back to the other and usually that starts off once more. After you've been writing so long as I you'll learn a system to keep yourself going. It depends on your view of life. If you're mature you'll find out how to work.'

'My writing is a mess,' he sighed. 'a fog, a blot.'

'You'll invent your way out,' said Olga, 'if you only keep trying.' (The Magic Barrel, pp 30-31) 

Inventing their way out seems to be something all of Malamud's characters do, in one way or another. The astonishing final story, 'The Magic Barrel', features a hapless rabbinical student, Leo Finkle, employing a matchmaker to find him a wife. To one of these prospective brides, Finkle explains his religious calling:

'I am not,' he said gravely, 'a talented religious person,' and in seeking words to go on, found himself possessed by shame and fear. 'I think,' he said in a strained manner, 'that I came to God not because I loved Him, but because I did not.' This confession he spoke harshly because its unexpectedness shook him. (The Magic Barrel, p. 164).

"A talented religious person," is a wonderful resonant phrase, and The Magic Barrel is full of moments like this. I recommend it.

Everybody loves a bonfire

Guy Fawkes

Humber Estuary: 1955

The last thing our Guy Fawkes will see

is the sea coming in to rescue him.

But the sea won't reach. The rockets

and Catherine wheels will reach,

 

but the tide is too low to douse a fire.

Shriveled to penny eyes and shells for teeth,

his ashes will drift to the estuary,

his wide mouth leak the oils and tars

 

of Sheffield's industrial froth.

Push-netters shrimping the shallows

might have helped if they had heard,

but they're ranters and levellers to a man.

 

"bonfire at ocean beach" by maywong_photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 . 

 

 

 

 

 

Everybody loves a bonfire.

Everybody loves to see Guy Fawkes burned.

The crowds will pay sixpence for fresh crab

and shrimps in brown paper bags.

 

The last thing our Guy Fawkes will see 

is the cocklers and inshore fishermen,

warm in tarred oilskins and sou'westers

pretending they are boys again,

 

shouting for the death of the straw man,

the fire of belief in their eyes,

the fists of the future in their hands.

a dance of screaming crowds in the sea.

 

~ William Bedford, The Dancers of Colbek (2020), p. 19

New Recipes of Exciting Times

If at the beginning of March you had asked me, 'Where do you see yourself in October?', my answer would not have been 'in a new country.' After twelve years in the UK, it's a surprise and delight to find myself in the Netherlands! At the beginning of September, I moved to Utrecht to start a postdoc on early medieval letter writing. So far so good--my colleagues and my work are wonderful, and the first two months have flown by.

Looking back over what I've cooked this year, what stands out is my purchase of a slow cooker in the late winter, and the period where I was interviewing for my new job (March and April) and moving (August and September). Change is hard on one's desire to cook new things, but I'm starting to feel settled in to my new kitchen, and looking forward to seeing what I'll cook here.

March

• Sabath masoor ki dal (brown lentils with onions, tomatoes, and ginger), Indian Slow Cooker
• Rajma (red kidney beans), Indian Slow Cooker
• Whole wheat spaghetti with roasted squash (source unrecorded)
  
• Avocado Chocolate Pudding from Leite's Culinaria 

 

 April

• Hare moong ki khichdi (green mung beans and rice), Indian Slow Cooker

I'd recommend this cookbook (as you can tell by the number of recipes I tried from it!)

 May

• Parsnip miso soup with sticky parsnip peel, Waitrose
• Lime and miso dressing, Natural
• Rosario Guillermo's Black Bean Charros, World Vegetarian
• Chana masala, Indian Slow Cooker
  

 June

• Tembal Dolma (cabbage with rice and currants), World Vegetarian
• South Indian Carrot and Ginger Relish, World Vegetarian
• Swedish Limpa Bread, Heartland

July

• Breakfast Carrot Cake Biscuits, Natural
• Sweetheart Cabbage with Sweetcorn and Chili, Stir Crazy
• Lemon Scotch Pancakes, 100 Cakes and Bakes

 September

• Spiced Cauliflower Soup, Smitten Kitchen
• Simplest Mushroom Pasta, Smitten Kitchen

October

• Winter Squash Soup with Red Onion Crisp, Smitten Kitchen Keepers
• Chickpeas Cooked in a Moghlai Style, World Vegetarian
• Risotto with tomato and aubergine, World Vegetarian
• Pumpkin with Sultanas, World Vegetarian

World Vegetarian continues to be one of my favourite cookbooks!

A Diptych for Molly

I go down to the shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

~ Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings, p. 1 

20 December 2022

I ask Percy how I should live my life

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

~ Mary Oliver, Red Bird: Poems via Words for the Year

2 September 2023 (A.C. Williard)

#AHA Reads 2023: The Illustrated History of Football by David Squires

One of the tasks I selected from the 2023 AHA Summer Reading Challenge was to read a graphic history. After searching my local library's catalogue, I selected cartoonist David Squires' The Illustrated History of Football, for the reasons that, 1) there were few options to choose from and 2) I know very little about sports history.

#AHAReads Bingo Card

The Illustrated History of Football is a book by a football fan for football fans. The book focuses on major games, tournaments, and players, with just enough cartoons covering the state of the sport to give an overall sense of narrative. An example:

The British Empire stretched to all corners of the globe, generously freeing foreign lands of their natural resources and introducing native people to order, genocide, and a ruddy good dose of fair play. The British also gave the gift of football to the world. The world showed its gratitude by becoming really good at it and ritually humiliating them on the international stage every couple of years or so. It wasn't just jackbooted imperialists who were spreading the game though. Britain's wealthy industrialists were setting up global operations too, taking with them workers who enjoyed nothing more than a lunchtime kickabout. Teachers, bankers, engineers, dock workers, sailors, miners; all of them plying their profession overseas, all of them displaying the famed British work ethic of wiling away the working hours until they could piss about with their friends. (16)

I'm writing this post as the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup begins. You wouldn't learn that women watch, let alone play, football from The Illustrated History of Football. The one mention of women in the entire book is a joke about English football managers resisting the inclusion of women's toilets in stadiums, a single panel in a cartoon about the renovation of stadiums and skyrocketing of ticket prices in the 1990s (123). There's also joke about a female television anchor being a football fan in a later panel of the same cartoon. 

To be fair to Squires, it's meant to be a funny book and the harassment and abuse experienced by female football fans is anything but amusing. While a 2021 survey by the Football Supporters Association shows that fans' disapproval of sexist and misogynist behaviour has increased since 2014, recent reporting by The Athletic shows that the sport still has a long way to go. (I read the latter piece after it was recommended in the Longreads weekly newsletter earlier this year.) Kick It Out's statistics for the 2022-2023 season show a massive increase in reporting of sexist and misogynistic abuse, especially online.

While we're on the subject of discrimination in football, a few comics in the book do highlight the long history of racism in football, especially in the 1990s, with the media response to Cameroon at the 1990 World Cup (118) and Jean-Marie Le Pen's bigotry towards France's 1998 World Cup team (141) held up as examples. The last cartoon in the book is from 2016, so more recent events, such as the 2020 European Championship are not covered.

While the experiences of female football fans might be hard to highlight in a cartoon history, the complete lack of mention of female footballers is surprising. Given that Squires wrote his football cartoons for the Guardian, this is baffling, but it also seems like a missed opportunity for poking fun at the outrageous, unjust or just plain ridiculous, something that Squires does elsewhere in the book. The British Ladies football association was founded in the 1890s, and the reporting about early women's football matches is unhinged. Jokes about newspaper reporting on early women footballers practically write themselves. Consider, however, fact that the largest crowd ever gathered in the UK for a women's football match was 53,000 people, and the match in question occurred in 1920. A year later, the Football Association banned women's football, a ban that was not lifted until 1971. The first women's World Cup took place in 1991--Squires' recent comic shows some of the highlights up to the present day.

These are all facts I learned from reading I did while writing this post; things I learned from The Illustrated History of Football itself include:

• that football fanzines exist
• an outline history of 1976 and 1978 World Cups
• that Steve McMahon and Bruce Grobbelar had a "hip-hop battle [sic]", the "Anfield Rap," one of the worst sports songs even made 
• that Columbian footballer Andrés Escobar was murdered after the 1994 World Cup 
• that the US Department of Justice indicted multiple senior of officials of FIFA (Fédération internationale de Football Association) on corruption charges in 2015
• that footballer Luis Suárez has bitten opponents, repeatedly, making him a gift to football cartoonists everywhere

In sum, this is book isn't an introduction to the history of football and isn't designed to be. If you have a father, brother, cousin, partner, or friend who is mad about football, this book might make a good present. I suspect that comics included have been selected make the book saleable to people who don't read the Guardian. While it did make me laugh in places, I'll keep looking for a book on the history of football the covers the larger social and cultural context that makes sports interesting to me.

#AHAReads: 2023 Summer Reading Challenge

It's time for the second annual #AHAReads, a summer reading challenge for historians. Even though it took me a year to finish, I loved participating in the 2022 challenge. Despite what a busy summer ahead, I still want to participate in the 2023 challenge and write about what I read.

Here's this year's bingo card.

#AHA Reads: 2023 Summer Reading Challenge Bingo Card

Between 1 June and 4 September (Labour Day in the United States), one can complete the challenge by picking three of the following options:

• Read a history written for young readers
• Read a history of your local community or state
• Read a graphic history
• Read a history written by someone with a different background from your own
• Free space: read a history that's been on your shelf too long (we all have one!)
• Read a history published before 2000
• Read a piece of historical fiction (novel, poem, story, play) set in the time or place you study
• Read a history that has been challenged or banned
• Read a history of a place you know little about

As I did last year, I'm setting the following additional guidelines:

• No purchasing books for the challenge. Books must either be already in my collection, borrowed from my library, or loaned by a friend.
  
• Print books only--summer reading challenges are supposed to be fun, and for me, reading an ebook is not.
  
• Blog about what I read and finish writing all posts by 4 September.
  

So which challenges have I chosen and what am I reading?

 

My first choice is to read a history that's been on your shelf too long (we all have one!). Although there are many late antique and early medieval history titles I could choose, I'm going to go with Karen Harvey's The Impostress Rabbit Breeder, which has been on loan from a friend for over a year, and which I need to return before the end of August.

 

The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder by Karen Harvey

My next choice is to read a history of a place you know little about. My choice is a book I've had borrowed from the library for awhile, Serhii Plokhy's The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.

The Gates of Europe by Serhii Ploky

My final choice is to read a graphic history. Thanks to the incredible work of my University's fine art librarian, the library where I work now has a zine collection! I've been wandering by and flipping through them for the past few months but haven't made the time to sit down and read one properly. Plus, zine are usually pretty short, and I may not have a lot of time for reading this summer.

 

Which should I read first? Wishing everyone participating in the challenge a fun selection of books, and the time and space to enjoy them.

#AHAReads 3: Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton

Last year I took part in the American Historical Association's first annual summer reading challenge. While I met my goal of reading and taking notes on three books between the first of June and the end of August, I didn't finish blogging about them. Until now!

The third and final book I read for #AHAReads 2022 was C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, which was inspired by the prompt to read a history of an identity group you don’t belong to.

The book blurb reads:

Black on Both Sides identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

Cover of Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton

From the start of the book, Snorton makes it clear that he is not writing a traditional historical study.

 'Organised around a series of events that provide occasion for bringing both signs--blackness and transness--into the same frame, Black on Both Sides is not a history per se as much as it is a set of political propositions, theories of history, and writerly experiments." p. 6

Non-traditional methods of analysis, he asserts, require non traditional structures (p.11-12). As a reader, I found these experiments thought-provoking and persuasive. The author's use of literary theory, trans theory, black studies, and theories of history, is that of an expert, and seeks to engage an audience able and willing to keep up. As a non-expert in any of these areas, I found it challenging, and worth it. As Snorton express it at the end of the book, 

'theory, at its best, is nothing more than "dreams/myths/histories" aimed at giving expression to ways of seeing and ways of being in the world.' (p. 185)

My main takeaway from the introduction and the first chapter was that, when blackness and transness coexist, this creates the possibility of flexibility in gender. Or as Snorton puts it,

'Together this chapter and its companion, "Anatomically Speaking" (chapter 1), explore how transness became capable, that is, differently conceivable as a kind of being in the world where gender--though biologized--was not fixed but fungible, which is to say, revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility.' p. 59

The book's five chapters are presented in three parts. The first chapter focuses on James Marion Sims' surgical experiments on enslaved black women, as way to examine how nineteenth century scientists categorised physical attributes of the body to create and support racial hierarchies. Snorton points out that, Sim's 'patients', as enslaved women, were fundamentally unable to consent to his experimental, unanesthetized surgical procedures (p. 24), yet his discussion of how Sim's autobiographical writings, and the nineteenth century medical establishment's responses to his work, focus on the experiences and perspectives of Lucy, Betsy, and Anarcha, and the unnamed enslaved women who were his experimental subjects and unacknowledged surgical attendants. Anarcha's experiences, in particular, lead into a discussion of the relationship between odour and disgust; Snorton raises the possibility that enslaved people may have deliberately use body odour for protection (p. 27). In discussing the limits of what we can understand about the experiences of enslaved women, Snorton uses Evelyn Hammond's work, particularly her  formulation of "black holes" in our evidence, to argue that historical analysis should be "attuned to the effects of an undetectably present thing" (p. 43)

The chapter serves to establish our understanding of the relationship between race and gender in nineteenth century America, which builds into the second chapter, discussing the ways that free Black people, and slaves seeking freedom, used mutability of gender. While an overseas slave trade became illegal in the United States in 1808, domestic slavery was legal until 1865, leading local and federal laws to 'articulate a grammar rife with euphemism to disavow the violent processes by which land and persons would find primary legal expression as property' (p. 56). One of the chapter's case studies is of the lives and writings of William and Ellen Craft. The Crafts fled enslavement in disguise--Ellen, who could pass for white, dressed in male clothing; her husband pretended to be her slave. Snorton describes the couple's different kinds of transition--between black and white, male and female, enslaved and free--as 'transubstantiation', and also explores the transformations wrought by their nineteen years of residence and activism in England, where they published an autobiography, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. Their book, Snorton argues, plays with audiences understandings and perceptions of racial characteristics.

'Speaking to a transnational audience of abolitioinists and others, whom he hoped to persuade to an antislavery position, Craft frames the 'cruelty' of American whiteness in terms of its particular species' characteristics.' (p. 85)

As Snorton makes clear, William and Ellen Craft's story is complex: their activism in England included support for British colonial expansion into Africa, and the educational and Christianizing projects that were part of this (p. 95). 

The complexities of race and self-representation are explored in the next section, 'Transit', which contains a single chapter focused on the "female" (the quotation marks are Snorton's) in books anthologised in Three Negro Classics (1965): Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson. Once the chapter's theoretical groundwork has been laid, Snorton's focus is on exploring the figure of the black mother. 'The black mother's gender is vestibular, a translocation marked by a capacity to reproduce beings and objects. But one should not mistake her figuration for the real.' (p. 107) The importance of keeping the differences between literary representation and reality is one that the authors Snorton examines emphasized to their audiences. As Snorton demonstrates in his analysis of the Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois explores

'how racism produces myriad institutional impediments for black artists while also undermining a myth of meritocracy, which would suggest that those black people who have been successful have done so because their work is so exceptional as to transcend race or racial prejudice...the popularity of black artists does not indicate more positive conditions for black people.' (p. 114)

These third and final section of the book, Blackout, focuses on the journalistic representations of trans stories. Snorton's methodology in engaging with the news as a source is to recognise midcentury framing and its purpose (which was to make those profiled seem like jokes), refrain from adding a 'conventionally satisfying ending' to stories that do not have one, and avoid including birth names or deadnames or accounts of trans awakenings, in favour of trying not to 'perform gender as teleology' (p. 145). The chapter focuses on reporting on the stories Black trans women, including Lucy Hicks Anderson (145-151), Georgia Black (151-157), Carlett Brown (157-161), and Ava Betty Brown (161-166), in the midcentury Black press. Reporters often reached for the story of Christine Jorgensen, a white trans woman, as a point of comparison, which in turn enables Snorton to analyse the role of race in reporting on trans stories. A key difference, as Snorton shows in the case of Ava Betty Brown, was the importance of 'black sociality'--Ava Betty Brown's friends, acquiantances and business associates all saw her as a woman, and as she said in court "If I am a man, I don't know it." (p. 162). The chapter concludes with a discussion of the story of James McHarris / Annie Lee Grant (162-174); a reporter's use of the word 'restive' sparks a thoughtful investigation of McHarris/Grant's gender fluidity. As Snorton writes,

'There is a growing consensus in transgender studies that trans embodiment is not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of the materiality of the body. Where one locates a 'transsexual real,' whether phenomenologically, in the practices (social, legal, medical, and so on) of transition, in  narrative, via the cinematic, or even in the unspeakable and unrepresentative aspects of imagining transness, shifts in relation to racial blackness. In apposition with transness, blackness, as, among modes of valuation through various forms, producing shadows that precede their constituting subjects/objects to give meaning to how gender is conceptualized, traversed, and lived.' 175

The final chapter brings together investigations of the intersection of transness and Blackness by examining reporting and film-making about the1993 murders of Brandon Teena, Philip DeVine, and Lisa Lambert. Despite the journalistic fever around Christine Jorgensen, Brandon Teena, after his murder, was characterised in the news 'as America's first glimpse into the world of transgender people.' (178-180) In the film Boys Don't Cry (1999), and other formulations of what Snorton calls 'the Brandon archive', Philip DeVine, who was Black and disabled, is left out of the story. Snorton stresses that the chapter does not aim to add Phillip DeVine back into the story or pull on the heartstrings. Instead, 'this chapter, following Sylvia Winter's work, asks, What aspects of DeVine's figuration, as a matter of sociogenesis, constitute a usable history for more liveable black and trans lives?' (p. 183). The final section of the chapter looks at the Black Lives Matter, Trans Lives Matter, and Black Trans Lives Matter movements, and how to create a future where 'all of these lives will have mattered to everyone' (p. 198). Learning from and listening to the past, as Snorton has done in Black on Both Sides, is hopefully one step towards that future.

Further Reading

Black on Both Sides was the subject of an African-American Intellectual History Society online roundtable, found on their blog, Black Perspectives. Each of the chapters is the subject of an essay, and the roundtable concludes with an author's response. Highly recommended if you want to see expert perspectives on this book--after reading it, it's clear to me that I missed or didn't follow a number of important points.

Professor Snorton was interviewed for UChicago News; it's a great read and includes discussion of Black on Both Sides.

There is also further reading in the book's endnotes. Jacqueline Dowd's idea of the long Civil Rights Movement seems very important to think with; it helps 'unsettle the version of linear progression that the previous chronology implied.' (p. 233) The notes also cites Tavia Nyong'o's Essay about Caster Semenya, which links contemporary panics about Semenya's gender and athletic performance with journalistic reactions to other people with 'non-normative gender presentations', like Peter Jones; there is a later version as a journal article here.

#AHA Reads

The rest of my #AHAReads posts can be found here:

• My grand plans for the 2022 challenge 
• AHA Reads #1: Theodora by Stella Duffy
• AHA Reads #2: The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak

The AHA has just shared the 2023 challenge and I'm looking forward to taking part and blogging about what I read.