Honest

Today we arrived in Prague. We made our way from the airport to downtown via public transport. We found our hotel.

The only mission for this first day, apart from getting ourselves fed and hydrated and libated, was to soak up some atmosphere and track down a copy of Honest Guide Prague. Which we did! And we also almost got lost! Twice! I'd say the day is a success.

It was weeks after I'd booked the flights that Helena remembered to tell me about this YouTuber she follows. I'm not sure we ever would've made it out of the airport without him. The videos are a treasure trove. And now the team has released a book in time for our trip.

It's full of great advice like:

You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't understand a building unless you go inside.

I'd just like to take a moment to geek out over this binding! (Coptic stitch? Waxed!)

A kind of flood of the flesh

I leaned over and kissed him. Ruben's lips parted, barely, but then he pushed me away.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I saw a film once," he said. "In Italian. A woman says to a man: Sodomizzami. Sodomize me. And he wanted nothing more, he'd dreamed about it forever, but he doesn't understand what she's saying. He's too uneducated. He doesn't understand, do you understand?"

We looked at each other, the two of us chuckling. I thought that maybe this was what is was like when intellectual people went to bed. Elegant and stiff, like someone with good posture eating mussels with a knife and fork, discussing film and quoting things in different languages even though you know you're facing ruin, a flood that is about to roll in and ravage everything all at once, a kind of flood of the flesh. This whole situation had lost its charm.

— from The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff.

Used her up

I feel somewhat blocked lately, in writing and reading. I tell myself it's because I'm busy with work, I'm still adjusting to my (no-longer-so-new) job, basking in the joy of work that is wholly engaging. But I don't want to be that person — I know there's more to life than work. I tell myself I'm living a balanced life, but neither am I being particularly social; I'm not dating much, it just doesn't seem worth the effort at the moment.

So I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm tempted to explain that it's not you, novels, it's me — it's not the right time and place for us. But rationalizing it, taking the blame, actually makes me angry, it's such bullshit. Why should it be my fault? One novel I'm working through is fascinating really, but just so damn big — it weighs on me — and I can't be bothered to carry it on my commute. The other novel I finally finished, but it was plodding — I didn't even have the strength of character to dump it.

My reading life and my dating life are somehow merged over the last year. I am for the most part attracted to books about sex and love and joy. Because I think they will help me process the sex and love and joy in my life. But sometimes they confuse me.

Maybe sometimes I confuse them. Sometimes I date the books and read the people, and I'm not sure I'm doing either the right way. (I should've dropped the book, not the guy.) Sometimes I challenge myself in the wrong ways.

Maybe I'm just tired and need a break.

**********

The bookstore emailed about the next bookclub meeting, but with only a week's notice, and by the time I got my hands on a copy of the book, I only had four and a half days to read it. I made it halfway in time for the discussion (but yes, I read it through to the end in the ensuing days).

I was grateful for the push to read something I wouldn't ordinarily pick up of my own accord: An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon.

It's science fiction of the generation ship variety. The ships decks reinforce the caste system; the ship is powered by slaves. The protagonist is queer and neuroatypical; Aster is also a healer.

Despite some serious social criticism and horrific violence, it's a story brimming with loving relationships beautifully described.

Aster said sister because she knew sisters could not choose to unsister themselves when their lives diverged dramatically. Friends who hated each other were no longer friends. Sisters who hated each other remained sisters, despite long silences, feuds, and deliberate misunderstandings.

The science behind the predicament of the ship is a little shaky, but this is a very rich novel in all other aspects.

Mostly it's a commentary on racism, with violence against women that's hard to stomach. One character, fathered by a lieutenant, passes as white and so he managed to climb to the position of Surgeon General and thus has privileged access to areas, people, and knowledge. But we see other characters slip between levels, whether it's using off-limit passageways, networks of family and nannying arrangements, or (essentially) black-market means.

The novel presents a very fluid perspective of gender, while integrating issues of mental illness and exploring how knowledge and history are preserved. The ship is also developing its own myths (a deep-seated sense of sin) and evolving languages on different decks.

One of the aspects I found most interesting is that while this is ostensibly occurring in the future, the ship society seem so backward. It leads me to speculate on how and why that might happen.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is very easy to read in the sense that the writing style is breezy, but it is very difficult to read for the harsh realities of its characters' living conditions. This clash woke up all my reading sensibilities.

It had the magical effect of taking me out of myself (even if it took me to some very grim places), when these days I tend to ask books to take me deeper into myself.

The bigness of her earlier mannishness was nowhere now. Short-lived. All that was left were taunts, and crack of Scar's knee, and the past swooping in, an unkindness of ghosts. Her old life had possessed her, strengthening her, but like everything, used her up and then was done.

The erotic sense of simply being alive

I think that in my case the erotic awareness of life, or, rather, its awakening coincided with the awakening of my urge to write; the two occurred simultaneously in a wave of sensuality, in a corresponding confusion of my senses.

[...]

I think it was the erotic sense of simply being alive that enticed and directed me into daydreaming. It's a preliminary stage of visualization, imagination, and has to do with the creation of another, second reality, another life — and yet, early on, I was more than a little ashamed of the inwardness that gave rise to this other reality.

— from My Year of Love, by Paul Nizon.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It both bores me and fascinates me. I find the narrator repulsive for reasons I have difficulty pinpointing, but also highly relatable.

I need to write more. Why am I not writing?