best of el

The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front has sought the council of Sága in the form of a rune reading. We received the following prophecy in reply.

ᚨ (Ansuz)

Screaming, I take up the runes.
A river of language pours from my open mouth–
Alive, the words carve meaning into a frozen world.
A comfort to the wise, and a charge.
Speak;
Your story begins.

In the beginning, then, the word
That sparking leap of conjuration,
Meaning brought forth from dead earth.
The way we speak of kings, in tales of debt and thunder.
The myths and lore. The cunning men who tell it.

This much is known:
I drink with Odin in a sunken place where water flows.

Odin, who screamed forth the runes from which you read,
And learned a woman’s magic.
This is an old tale,
Old as glaciers, a saga written on the earth itself.

He died. He hung nine days upon a tree and died.
Whatever war he fought was lost,
Gungnir’s bite upon his side,
He hung, alone, and died. 

This much is known.

This is the magic of the word.
The way the very speaking of a thing creates it.
I say “the crossroads where he hangs”
And you can feel the chill,
Smell the rot and shit from off his body,
Hear the wind trace a lazy finger
Across his freezing chest, which draws an agonal breath
The likes of which there’s what, a handful left?

This much is known.
This is how the story ends.

Imagine it. The flaming eye sputtering out,
The last thing the gallows’ burden sees
My runes, just eight and three.
Among the spots of light that strobe across his dying eye,
He learns their secrets.

And then he screams.

Imagination fails here.
This is a pain beyond words.
A god is dying.
And then he isn’t.
A scream that grinds like ice,
And then escapes.

The rest is lost,
Is just a whisper passed between a gallows pair
Who drink beneath the earth.
Even my name’s an ambiguity,
Derived perhaps from sight, perhaps from speech,
This gap the spring from which my magic flows.

The thing unsaid, or said in lies,
Made up, and then come true.
The text below the text, the hidden word,
The secret cloaked in paradox and metaphor.
This is the magic I taught him
There upon the gallows tree.

The raven tester paid me well.
Gave me a hall,
A sunken place where waters flow,
So radiant a glacier stopped
To drank it in, an ice age nib
That carved a rune into the earth,
A watery digit pointing to this spot.

What? You thought these were just streets you walked,
And not the corridors of thought?
That Ithaca was just a town above Cayuga’s waters
When so much treasure lays beneath its ground?
You ask for omens?
Why look, there’s Alex Haley’s roots,
And there a buried map of Sagan’s cosmos.
There’s Feynman stood beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud
And Courtney Love beneath her grief.…

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This post, and work like it is only possible because of the support of my Patrons. And speaking of Patreon, we’re currently $450 a month in pledges away from Doctor Who reviews being posted to the site instead of paywalled. If you’re interested in that, or in supporting my work in general, you can join the Patreon here.

Also, I’ve created a playlist surveying Baez’s career for anyone who’s interested. It’s up on both Spotify and Apple Music.

Upon some self-reflection, I’ve determined that my single most heterodox critical position is that the greatest recording artist of the 1970s is Joan Baez. This is not true because of a lack of heterodox opinions in other spheres—Wish is the best Cure album, the Peter Capaldi/Jenna Coleman era of Doctor Who is the pinnacle of the series, if you’re in an American wine store you’re better off with South America than France—but because on almost every level the critical deck is stacked against Joan Baez. To use a recent example, it’s striking that when Jan Wenner, desperately backpedaling after being called out for writing a book called The Masters consisting entirely of interviews with white guys, tried to think of any women or people of color he had any respect for, the names he came up with were people like Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Grace Slick, or Curtis Mayfield—other singer-songwriters in the mould of his supposed masters. Joan Baez never even gets a look in. To be clear, I’m no more surprised by this than I am that Wenner failed to interview anyone that isn’t a white guy. While certainly an able and at times brilliant songwriter, Baez was largely more famed as an interpreter of other people’s songs, and so doubly excluded from Wenner’s paradigm. (For her part, when asked about Wenner’s comments, Baez’s response was simply “he’s a schmuck.”)

And yet the poptimists who might have embraced Baez in the same way they do Rihanna, Aretha Franklin, Madonna or any number of other stars who made their careers interpreting other people’s songs or working with established songwriters to develop originals also tend to neglect her. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, folk music is a rockist genre; the poptimists don’t go for Peter, Paul, and Mary or Judy Collins either. For another, however, the nature of Joan Baez’s pop stardom is odd. Whether it’s the aesthetic reputation of folk music, Baez’s steadfast political activism, or just her resolute disinterest in performing coolness, she comes off as fussy and stodgy in a way that keeps her from ever having gotten claimed. Indeed, as we’ll see, the particular sort of pop star she was is one that is almost necessarily not going to rise to the top of the poptimist heap. The result is that Baez’s legacy largely sits in the hands of a bunch of rockist twats who view her as a 6/10 historically significant also-ran, as opposed to one that even gets her a look-in as a dark horse pick for something like “greatest recording artist of the 1970s.” …

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Christine:

Since listening to some of these songs in the car with you on the way to grandma’s for Christmas and realizing you were less familiar with the 90s female singer songwriter boom than I’d assumed, I’ve had it in my head to try to communicate what it was like to be a trans teenager at that precise moment. So, because I’m me, I wrote you an 8000 word essay/annotated playlist and am posting it on your birthday. So happy birthday. There aren’t a ton of rules for this; it’s all female vocals, mostly from the 90s, though anything that came out during my life but before I graduated high school was eligible, so there’s two 80s tracks. I centered the playlist on the Lilith Fair; a touring festival of female musicians that took place from 1997-99 and that always felt to me like the nexus of the musical era I’m trying to sketch for you, although songs by non-Lilith Fair artists are included. Likewise, the songs are not always my favorites, whether from the period or now—they are chosen instead because they collectively capture a fragile strand of libidinous glamor that I hung onto for dear life as a kid.

Oh, and everybody else: Yep, it’s our very own Christine Kelley’s birthday. Don’t forget to support her work on Patreon.

Apple Music Version

1. Ani DiFranco, Untouchable Face (1996; Never Played Lilith Fair)

The central moment to remember, years later, with a vivid clarity so intense you can practically feel the upholstery, will be sitting in the passenger seat of your mother’s car outside the Borders in Farmington. By this point you are already into this sort of thing—a clear and developed fondness for the female singer-songwriter boom. You have heard of Ani DiFranco somewhere on the Internet, recognizing her as a next door neighbor to stuff you already like, and so on your next shopping trip you spend your allowance on Dilate. You head out to the car with your mother, pop it into your Discman™, and give it a listen.

At first it seems familiar—a lilting guitar, a slightly melancholy vocal, wistfully nursing a breakup with a seemingly amused distance. You will understand this through the first verse. You will think you have a handle on this. And then Ani DiFranco will calmly, even sweetly, intone the first “fuck you” of the chorus.

In truth this is cringe. DiFranco is already exiting her imperial phase—you will later rehearse an argument that the precise moment her career goes off the rails is the horn part on the first track of her next album. In years to come she will play a plantation, rewrite the barnstorming pro-union “Which Side Are You On” into a piece of bland pro-Obama glurge, and generally become a middle-class parody of the DIY folk-punk icon she momentarily appeared to be. She will be a taste you embarrassedly defend to Lexi, until she grudgingly admits that Amanda Palmer played a similar role for her. …

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Listen up fives, a ten is speaking.

Let’s start with the context. Although the mainstreaming of trans culture is a thing that has happened and is continuing to happen, like any future’s arrival it has been unevenly distributed, not least in the way in which it’s paralleled efforts at our extermination. One facet of this—especially relevant in the realm of trans SF/F—is the prominence of a particular trans aesthetic. It’s the one Charlie Jane Anders gestured at in her self-proclaimed “Sweetweird Manifesto”—one that’s seen Hugo nominations for Ryka Aoki and, of course, for Anders herself. It’s largely the one the Wachowskis have settled on, much as they retain a lingering fondness for fetish aesthetics. It’s the one on display in the successes of Rebecca Sugar and Nate Stevenson have had in children’s media. 

I neither want to condemn this aesthetic—it’s produced a number of genuinely great works—nor, really, to analyze it unduly and try to delineate its borders or rigorously define it. Let’s offer a few arbitrary touchstones and move on: anime fandom, belief that the colors of the trans flag are something other than vomit-worthy, a fandom history going back to Tumblr, catgirls, strong attachment to children’s media… you get the picture. As trans aesthetics go, it’s done well for itself, not least because it’s compatible with existing trends in SFF—what I’ve previously called Torwave and others, more pejoratively and to my mind less coherently, have called squeecore. But, crucially, other trans aesthetics exist—ones that haven’t done as well in the mainstream.

One is what I like to call “angry goth trans,” in contrast to the dominant aesthetic of “cute anime trans.” (I was very proud of this joke as a baby trans.) Anyone decently steeped in trans culture knows the type: the trans woman with the noise band and a favorite Mark Fisher book, who goes for an outright punk aesthetic and has gloriously snooty taste in films, who thinks William S. Burroughs is still relevant and hated J.K. Rowling long before she became a TERF. These are the trans we don’t let out, in part because they’re fucking terrifying—slightly feral creatures whose social failure mode is not faintly endearing cringe but doom-laden prophecies and rage to chill the Erinyes’s blood. But also, if we’re being honest, because there’s something a lot less commercial about dungeon synth than there is about Steven Universe. And that’s just the way it is for angry goth trans. If you’re lucky, you also work in tech or are in a polycule with someone who works in tech so that your profoundly maladaptive ass can pay rent. You might make art, but you do it as a hobby because you are simply too fucking weird for any sort of success or existence outside of the queer fringes of culture.

And then there’s Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose debut novel, an explicitly trans splatterpunk zombie apocalypse thriller called Manhunt, has unexpectedly found itself to be one of the hottest books out of Tor this year.…

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My father, Edward Sandifer, passed away on Wednesday after a long illness. He was a neuroatypical wonder of midwestern farmfolk the start conditions of which simply do not exist in the world anymore. He is also, in many ways, why I am the sort of person I am, and why this site is what it is.

This is the eulogy I read this morning at his burial.

You used to, whenever the family would come over, find a way to sneak off with some tea and read. It wasn’t that you were rude to people. Quite the opposite; you were always charming, interested in what people had to say, enthusiastic, and warm. You loved your friends and your family. It’s just that after enough time being extroverted, you’d get overwhelmed and find it necessary to retreat. I was always much the same way, which suited us both, not least because we often didn’t seem to count towards the other’s sense of being overwhelmed by company. So even when we were visiting someone else, we could find a corner of a room, sit, and talk about whatever interested us that day. I loved talking to you, loved engaging with the way your mind worked: the long, fascinating arcs of your reasoning and knowledge, and the swerving paths of connections you could draw from one thing to another. And so my audience will, I hope, forgive me if I do it one last time. I’m supposed to talk to all of them here, but I can’t. I’m overwhelmed. I need to sit down with some tea and talk to you.

My favorite time we ever talked was when we were on a Metro North train back from New York City, and I asked you a question that, perhaps eighteen years into my life, I realized I still did not have an answer to. I was attempting a reconciliation with Christianity that proved theoretically possible but practically unsatisfying, and I finally got around to asking you about religion. Mom and Grandma always made me go to church, but you never had to go and never spoke of it, agreeing the proscription existed but having no visible investment in the principle behind it. Twenty years of hindsight and I can see the parental faultline negotiated clear as day, the conversations that must have taken place away from your child’s ears. At the time, it was just a mystery. You looked thoughtful, as if I’d asked a good question, which was always a good feeling. Our discourse was Socratic—you answered with a question, and I replied, until my query had narrowed to something about the divine. I wanted to know your take on the noumenal. What did your spiritual life consist of? Or, as I finally ended up framing it, how did you worship? Mom worshiped, and I was expected to worship, through church, prayer, Christianity, but what did you do? And you thought for a minute, and said “the only way I know how to worship is to understand and appreciate.”…

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