#religious conservatism cw | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

deco-devolution · 3 years

Photo

Sexuality & Gender In Columbia

Okay, so this is a frankly huge topic to cover, and because there is so little direct reference to any non-heterosexual/cisgender culture in the games, a lot of this will be me sharing/explaining my headcanons/worldbuilding. My ideas will be based on historical record of LGBT+ struggles at the time (1890-1915) and mostly US-centric, as Columbia seems to be fairly westernized. in addition, I will be focusing purely on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities to cut down on post size and research time. Here we go!

Note: These all refer to Columbia (Rapture has a separate post) culture in the peak of the city’s life- a snapshot into queer Columbia circa 1910, roughly speaking. As such my talk about the culture is purely as I’d imagine it to be at that specific time only with no details as to the cultural development to that point.

cw for homophobia, transphobia, q slur

Sexuality In Columbia

If you’re not straight it’s over for you

Quips aside, just from playing the game you can tell Columbia is ruled by the most staunch of conservatism. The Edwardian Era in real-world history made heavy emphasis on modesty and a sense of duty but Columbia takes it a step beyond, and this can be seen in most every example of media or dialogue found in-game. Having such traditional Biblical leanings, it can easily argued that this also extends to sexuality.

Right off the bat, I feel like this is Heterosexual (& Cisgender) Land™. Any other sort of attraction, be it gay, bisexual, or anything else, is considered reckless experimentation at best and ungodly and deserving of punishment at worst. Aside from the religiously-motivated belief that only straight relationships are legit, there’s another reason they’re so heavily emphasized- population growth. Columbia, for all its pomp still has a relatively small population on a national scale- just from some educated guesses I’d put it around the borough to town region, as indicated on the settlement hierarchy of ekistics. While the limited space of the city means that the population can’t just continue to grow, a certain rate of births is needed to keep the population level.

Interestingly enough, even though Columbia is a hotspot of religious zealotry, the city still follows the conventions of Edwardian/Early WWI society- very proper, highly formalized in its ideals. Aside the propaganda and fearmongering, personal details are still taboo in polite conversation.

Cruising is done in places where social conventions are significantly different from formal events or even everyday conventions- namely the beach, pubs and lounges.

In the same vein, hookups, flings, and dates are called vague things like “going out to lunch/drinks”, “going for a stroll” or “having a picnic” and same-gender partners are typically referred to as close friends. It’s all very underhanded, the result of both Edwardian discreetness and closeted language.

Gender In Columbia

Like most of Columbian society, the queer groups in Columbia tend to gather based on gender. Lesbians share space with bisexual women, and gay men stick with bisexual men. As far as trans communities go, however, the cisnormative, rigid interpretation of gender predominant in Columbia means that they tend to be misunderstood among the other queer groups. Typically not in a blatantly hostile way but rather an obnoxiously condescending “poor confused dear” way.

Gender is not so much an identifier as much as an determinator; whatever you are assigned will be the factor driving not only your upbringing but your life choices as well.

There are quite a few social clubs that operate as safe spaces for the community- they typically rotate between the members’ houses and frequently merge or splinter with or from other groups, going from book club, to knitting social to any other politely banal gathering.

For those looking to dress how they’d like in safety, ‘costume clubs’ are popular among gender non-conforming, trans people and those interested in crossdressing. They present themselves as sort of novelty dance halls with every day being a masquerade. While technically legal, their image is strongly connected to immorality and looseness in Columbia and as such they’re rare and subject to higher levels scrutiny then other halls.

Because of the rigidity of the culture, the LGBT+ culture in Columbia uses nonverbal queues to state their identities- for example men place certain flowers in buttonholes or alternatively pin them to their lapels to let outsiders know they’re in the community. Women can put these same blossoms in their hats, brooches and hair. These include flowers such as lavender, violets, pansies, carnations and daffodils.

There are HRT gene tonics for sale- they’re marketed under the guise of improving a woman’s femininity or man’s masculinity, they’re sold in pharmacies in the health and beauty aisles without the need for a prescription. This helps some looking to transition do so much easier, though the issue of financial barriers for those who are younger and/or living in poverty still linger. As far as options like SRS go, the procedure is entirely underground, practiced by surgeons of varying repute. While being able to do so successfully is considered a show of skill, most practitioners and citizens are morally opposed to the idea.

Unlike Rapture, there’s not many fun or quirky terms for LGBT+ citizens. Those with same gender attraction are rudely referred to as “victims of unnatural passions” and those who ID as anything other then cisgender are accused of “falling into delusions of identity”. Among themselves though, WLW call themselves “Lady Lovers of Liberty” (as in the statue based on the Roman goddess Libertas) while MLM call themselves “Sons of Antinous” while trans citizens typically refer to themselves as “Children of Agdistis”. (Note that while Agdistis was portrayed as intersex in Roman mythology, their nonbinary existence and transformative identity made them a relatable icon for most trans people in Columbia)

Questions or comments? Let me know! Thanks for reading.

#mine #bioshock infinite #biotalk #bioshock #will update soon!

129 notes · View notes

blessedarethebinarybreakers · 3 years

Note

Looking over your blog, I'm not sure weather to laugh or cry at what you believe. You're making God an image of yourself, trying to fit in your beliefs onto him. Giving out a false doctrine, God's word does not change to suit the status of this world, your twisting the word of God to make yourself feel comfortable. You better change the way you view God and Bible, because when you stand in front of God in the end the words that he will say to you are "Depart from me I never knew you"

cw pointless rant, queerphobic anon

so. my policy is not to engage with anon hate because if you’re not willing to enter into true dialogue i’m not gonna spend my limited time and energy on you -- and more importantly, i don’t want to expose my followers to hateful stuff.

but congratulations to anon no. 3 from the other day, you successfully boiled my blood! you’re getting a rise outta me! good work.

_________

“You better change the way you view God and Bible, because when you stand in front of God in the end the words that he will say to you are "Depart from me I never knew you"”

So you’re referencing Matthew 25:31-46, i.e. one of the most powerful exhortations to tangible, active service in the Bible. This is a passage that emphasizes orthopraxy ( “right action” ) over orthodoxy ( “right belief” ) -- and yet here you are accusing me of molding scripture to suit my needs while you make use of this action-focused passage to damn me for my beliefs.

The ones whom "the Son of Humanity” rejects in this story are those who might have their beliefs right (they know to call Jesus “Lord”), but who still failed to attend to the needs of their fellow human beings -- particularly those with whom Jesus most identifies: the hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, stranger, etc.

Look. i’m a human being with a finite understanding and plenty of flaws. i know i don’t have everything right when it comes to what i think about the Bible and/or God. And therefore i thank God that getting in to God’s Kin(g)dom doesn’t come with a written exam where i have to get all the answers right. God knows no human being would pass such an exam! What Jesus is more concerned about is how we relate to one another. My gravest failings don’t involve mistaken interpretations, but rather the many times i’ve failed to reach out to an outcast, to insist that people’s basic needs are met, to stand up for those in prisons, and so on.

Honestly, now that i’ve written all this out, anon, i’m not really angry anymore. i’m just...sad. Because if living into the Kin(g)dom of God is about worshipping God through right relationship not only with Them but also with fellow human beings, well...i might be failing that here with you. i’m ready to curse you and spurn you and refuse connection with you. ...maybe that’s fine -- maybe i can “shake the dust from my feet” because trying to connect with you on a mutual level is so unlikely...or maybe i’m supposed to try to connect if i can. i don’t know. i don’t know. i’m sad and tired just thinking about it.

Anyway. Here’s hoping you and i can both learn to live into Jesus’s challenging call, so that he will recognize us by our fruits and tell us both “well done.” Maybe you and i will connect then, be empowered to build a true relationship then.

________

oh huh, since i’m publishing this where people will see your comments, i should probably respond to the first half of your message too...

....But i get that you and i are speaking two very different languages when it comes to discussing the Bible, so i’m unlikely to say anything that makes sense to you. In case you just don’t know about the different ways different Christians engage with scripture, i’ve got a webpage on the framework i and many of my denominations employ. If you’re interested.

For now, the following is more for anyone else who wants to see my answer to your accusations about making God in my image and all that.

look. i do my best not to let my own thoughts and biases corrupt the blessed glimpses God offers me of Themself..... After all, as Shirley Guthrie writes,

“There is always the danger that we will find in the Bible only what we take with us to it – that we will use it to confirm what we already think and will only hear what we want to hear. …Comfortable, powerful people usually find that the Bible supports social and political conservatism; poor, exploited people usually find that it supports social and political reform or revolution. What is to keep us from simply using the Bible to give authority to our own religious, social, political, and economic prejudices? What is to prevent us from using the study of this ancient book as a pious excuse for refusing to face the radical claims of the living God on every area of our lives, here and now?"

i do everything i can to remain aware of my own biases and assumptions, and sort of balance my own perspective by reading up on as many others as i can -- Fundamentalist, sure, as well as Womanist, Disabled, Indigenous, Dalit, liberationist, atheist, Jewish, on and on. The more perspectives we bring to the table, the more obvious it is how we all are influenced by our own contextual location when we try to interpret scripture or get to know God. But in listening to and learning from one another, we can get more and more glimpses.

I’ll close with some links to other posts that might help anyone troubled by content in anon’s ask:

“How do we take context into account when reading the Bible without using it to justify what we already think?”

“God is dead. Which God?”

A short sermon I once preached about Romans 12′s “Don’t be conformed to the world” and how it’s used against queer folks and others when it’s those whose theologies uphold the status quo that are “conforming to the world”

“How do you deal with the Bible passages that “condemn” being gay? / If God is okay with LGBT people why does the Bible speak against it?”

“I’m scared of going to hell for being lgbt / i’m struggling to accept myself”

#not sure how to tag this #matthew 25 #anon hate #discourse ///#queerphobia #Anonymous #sorry y'all i just got so cranky. like. the fearmongering!!!! in threatening me with hell #if i don't change my wicked beliefs in time #and putting that threat in Jesus' mouth when his 'depart from me' was not #about. right belief. ach i get so angry at fearmongerers #but now i'm mostly just tired

75 notes · View notes

vimesbootstheory · 4 years

Text

I finished the books/stories/plays from episodes 61-70 over overdue, woo! Again, beware spoilers. Especially for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Also, fictional suicide attempt mention cw.

1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker 2. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne 3. The Passage by Justin Cronin 4. You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers 5. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde 6. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 7. The Crucible by Arthur Miller 8. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque 9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 10. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell 11. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

12. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie -- (Major SPOILERS that will properly ruin this book for you, beware.) This was a pretty recent re-read, I’d only read this for the first time in the summer of 2018 (it is now summer 2020), so I can still remember my first impressions of the book in addition to these second impressions. What colours a lot of my impressions of this Christie mystery, which has been called the greatest mystery novel of all time, is that I was quasi-spoiled for it. The spoiler I received was this: it has an amazing plot twist. And the thing is, I took that as a challenge, and though I would not typically do this on purpose, on some level, I meta-read it. Which I feel like a lot of people will do anyway with a whodunnit story, you want to figure out whodunnit, right? But the superlative being used here, it ramped up the challenge. So of course, I put together that the twist was the identity of the killer, and I figure out who the killer was pretty early on. And to me, that’s not fun. Ideally what happens is that I’m surprised, and the answer to the mystery makes sense and makes me want to re-read the story to see how it was planned out from the beginning. I actually like Agatha Christie a lot (I was even in a musical theatre adaptation when I was a kid, I played the killer as well as a red herring character) and Poirot is my favourite of her main characters -- zee leetle grey cells! He’s so fucking cute. But it was a bummer for me to call the ending. Anyway, this time through it was a given that I’d know the killer, which actually made it pretty enjoyable. The killer (once again, MAJOR SPOILERS) is the narrator of the novel, and the novel is sort of epistolary in the sense that the book is an actual document that exists and is being written in-universe, and in order to get away with it and still be able to sell the book to a hypothetical publisher, the narrator purposefully does not incriminate himself until the end of the book, and yet he also never says anything that is untrue about his reactions to situations. One bit I particularly liked was when he pretends to receive a call from the murder victim’s home, but in-text he never mentions anything that the person on the other end says, only his own reply, which he really said (in the company of other people, so it’s not a Gossip Girl thing where he pretends to be innocent when nobody is around). It’s a bit contrived, but I bought into it and had fun viewing the novel through a different lens.

13. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 14. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka 15. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

16. Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier -- I found this to be a comfy read, and enjoyed the time I spent with it. Griet is a very well-defined character; though she wouldn’t be anyone I’d spend a lot of time with voluntarily, I still appreciated her conservatism and firm religious principles even as I could not relate to them, because they were so consistent and felt real for her. Her discomfort and resultant sleeping problems due to the overbearing catholic art in her original sleeping quarters were particularly interesting. Her intuitiveness when it came to learning Vermeer’s style so well that she was able to anticipate his decisions before he made them -- that was really cool and made Griet admirable. I appreciated that she was allowed to make sensible decisions throughout the whole story, while still preserving the plot. It’s also a rare example of a love triangle done in a way that did not annoy me at all. Griet is not waffling between two men, really. She is infatuated with her master who has a lot of power over her, and I don’t think the novel ever really romanticizes the idea of Griet and Vermeer ever actually being together, and doesn’t try to cast Vermeer as the one nice rich guy who treats the help like people. The book doesn’t treat that union as a real possibility. Vermeer is a sexual awakening for Griet in an internal sense only, maybe even just in a theoretical sense -- I would listen to an argument that Griet could be asexual. Meanwhile, Griet firmly rejects Pieter-the-son (so called because his dad is also Pieter) until it suits her own personal growth and life situation to start a family with him. I’m not usually big on period piece books, but I liked that this one, unlike most I’ve encountered, is not set in England. I don’t think I’ve ever read any other books that take place in the Netherlands but I wouldn’t mind reading more.

17. Life of Pi by Yann Martel 18. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes 19. Replay by Ken Grimwood

20. The Lorax by Dr. Seuss -- Short and simple, but super fun to read. I love the whimsy and deliberate nonsense of the more cohesively story-shaped Seuss books. I love all the made-up words, I love all the fuck-you flouting of anybody who would say that Seuss can't rhyme a word with the same word. The take on environmentalism is not nuanced but sometimes you just need to drop an anvil and not qualify it. Also, I definitely cried not only when my favourite line came up ("Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / Nothing is going to get better. It's not.") but also allll the way up to it, once I figured out it was coming. That line is incredibly powerful, and it works for causes beyond environmentalism. It dissuades complacency and empowers active social change, and is blunt about what will happen if nobody acts: NOTHING will get better.

21. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 22. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J Gaines 23. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

24. The Giver by Lois Lowry -- This was a re-read, but it had been over fifteen years and I'd forgotten most of it. I've seen this book criticized as having flimsy, nonsensical world-building and too many plot holes, but it worked fine with me. Enough was suggested for me to get what was being intended, and I feel that with this book, the message and the emotional journey are a lot more important than plausible world-building. I did find it very emotionally compelling, and enjoyed the world-building for what it was. I was all excited to see the job-assignment ceremony take place, and was entertained learning all the milestones that accompany each new year. There's nothing particularly unpredictable about the book -- you know the emotional journey that Jonah will go through because you already know all the memories he is bound to receive, since the memories are all from our time or earlier. But again, it's the execution of the emotional journey that's important. I definitely teared up when the Giver revealed what happened to the last Receiver of Memories, and I definitely was out in public. It can be a bit schmaltzy sometimes, I will say. The fact that the Giver's favourite memory was a family Christmas celebration, oh wow did I ever roll my eyes. And the ending is pretty rushed. Also, I feel like it buried the lede in terms of the odd, insidious political agenda it's carrying around. Obviously the community is genuinely dystopic, but the framing of some of the world-building comes across as anti-communist, possibly anti-socialist to me. Highly odd.

25. Dracula by Bram Stoker 26. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

27. Oh the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss -- Apparently this book is a very common read upon graduation, but I have no clear and certain memories of having read this. It's more of an inspirational speech with excellent illustrations, more than a real story. I really appreciated the baldness with which Seuss states, without qualification, that you WILL fail, you WILL fall into a slump, you WILL experience loneliness, but that a path exists to move beyond those hard times into easier ones. Enjoyably honest and realistic. Wish that I'd read it before going to post-secondary school, it would have helped me through some tough times.

28. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 29. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 30. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 31. World War Z by Max Brooks 32. Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt 33. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut 34. Eddie and the Cruisers by P.F. Kluge 35. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr & E.B. White 36. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 37. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 38. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain 39. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre 40. In The Woods by Tana French 41. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw 42. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami 43. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

44. Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker -- This is a short story that was incredibly sad yet is told with a brisk, upbeat pace, which is my favourite way to consume sad stories. It’s a story about how society (and especially the society when and where this took place, urban Jazz Age) will not let a woman feel if those feelings preclude her acting as a source of entertainment, and how this complete lack of sensitivity ultimately leads the main character to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. I am immediately a fan of how Parker could turn a phrase, and she really made me feel for poor Hazel despite our not really sharing much in common. I’d love to transport Hazel to the 21st century where mental health support services actually exist.

45. Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers 46. Dune by Frank Herbert 47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum 48. Tiny Alice by Edward Albee

49. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink -- The thing about this book is that it starts out pretty interesting, with a fascinating choice of setting (Germany, post-WWII, post-Nuremberg trials) as well as an interesting choice of protagonist just in terms of demographics -- I’d never before bothered to wonder about the psychology of the children of those who watched Nazi Germany happen and either helped it along or did not do anything to stop it. And this book does get into that a bit, though not for long enough and not in-depth enough to compensate for the book’s problems. It’s surprisingly emotionally shallow for its subject, for one. For another, the emotional hook that it posits is, arguably, the “betrayal” of finding out that Hanna had been an Auschwitz guard, and is guilty of some pretty typically evil Nazi shit. But here’s the thing, I was already not on board with Hanna, because she was in a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old. I feel like we were supposed to project on Michael and like her because he likes her, but nah. I particularly did not like the attempted… humanization (?) of her via her insecurities about her illiteracy. Illiteracy is a subject that is so rarely addressed in fiction, let alone addressed with sensitivity and perspect, that I resented a nazi p*do being the character to tell that story.

50. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

51. King Lear by William Shakespeare -- This isn’t my favourite Shakespeare play that I’ve read, but it isn’t my least favourite either, it’s middle-of-the-road. It was mildly frustrating how so many conflict elements could have been resolved just from having people talk to each other. I didn’t like how so many of the deaths were off-stage, some even just mentioned in passing even if they concern pretty major character(s). Give me some dramatic deaths, Bill, you laze-about. The villain (or at least who I would consider the main villain) Edmund was very love-to-hate, an enjoyable villain. I really thought Cordelia was going to be more involved, and was surprised and disappointed when gets put on a bus and we don’t hear from her until pretty shortly before she dies. I think my favourite bits are the scenes with Edgar and the pour blinded Earl of Gloucester, especially when Edgar is lying about them walking uphill and for some reason that works.

52. Medea by Euripides 53. Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare 54. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 55. The War of The Worlds by HG Wells

56. Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan -- I was really disappointed with this one. The concept is so cool, and I even enjoyed the first 1/4th of it pretty OK, though the prose is never outstanding -- very curt and casual with no real artistry to it, kinda clunky. But the concept! Mysterious tall and skinny bookstore with long ladders for book access! Mysterious patrons with unfathomable motivations! Mysterious ancient books that the main character is not allowed to look at! I even liked the initial attempts at marrying the old and new with Clay’s attempts to bring in new clientele with hyper-specific Google ads, and his attendance at his crush’s party via video-chat. But once Clay finishes with the borrowed log book, the last source of potential tension vanishes from this book and the whole enterprise falls on its face. I’ve seen this described as ‘Dan Brown but good’ but, as much as I hate to pay Brown a compliment, at least Brown writes stakes in his books. At least there’s conflict, even if it’s predictable conflict. (Perhaps the worst sin of this book is making me consider changing Da Vinci Code’s ranking.) Nobody seems to have told Sloan that plot-driven books (and this book, if it’s driven by anything, is plot-driven by default) need to have conflict. MP24HB has virtually none. I was a little concerned about what would happen if and when Clay got caught by his boss in the process of stealing the log book, but then Mr Penumbra finds out and is pleased, and that sets the tone for the rest of the story. Whenever it looks like Clay might encounter an actual problem, it is solved immediately with no real effort on anyone’s part, and usually turns out to be a good plot development after all. Clay is a completely nothing character, his closeness with Mr Penumbra is entirely unearned, and none of the secondary characters leave any real impression either, they’re just blank slates with convenient skills. That’s what the “plot”, if you can call it that, is driven by: a bunch of people with no personalities and an assortment of technical skills that are all well-suited to a specific task. It’s more like a feat of talent recruitment than a cast of characters. There are only two vaguely significant female characters; one is one of three caricature bookstore patrons who are the most fun the book has to offer in the way of characters, but who are incredibly tonally dissonant with all the regular-seeming 20-somethings in Clay’s daily life. The other is Kat, the love interest I guess, who seems fun and charming for two seconds until you realize that she’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who really, really wants to fuck Google. Seriously, I yelled aloud ‘Google’s not gonna fuck you!’ on multiple occasions, alternately directed at Kat and Sloan himself. This book is so obsessed with Google, in a way that’s very tied to exactly when this book was written. I’m sure MP24HB was already dated as soon as it was published, it’s already more dated now less than ten years later, and it’s only going to age like milk as time passes. Kat is the worst of the Google-fuckers (or ‘Googlers’, as they are actually literally called, in print, in this book) but they’re all pretty bad. Everybody under the age of 50 in this book is just so up themselves about current technology, while fulfilling every stereotype you’ve ever heard about millennials living and working in Silicon Valley. Sloan even specifies when a character eats something that it’s gluten-free or vegan or whateverthefuck. Oh, and one of the weirdest bits is that I’ve read that Sloan is an computer programming enthusiast, but one of the biggest programming plotlines doesn’t make any sense -- they harness Google to try to decrypt this book, and as the scene progresses there are all these computers displaying visualizations of their decryption process, as if that wouldn’t make the whole ordeal way, way slower, and then screens display nothing and they take that to mean that nothing worked, even though they hadn’t established any kind of expected output, and the monitors definitely wouldn’t just be black, there’d be some kind of message even if it were just an error message. Anyway my ranting is going too long but this is a very poorly conceived book. At the very least it needed way more conflict, and several more drafts. It made me embarrassed for Sloan, because I could see the seams of the writing very clearly, and there was a lot left to tidy up and make more story-shaped.

57. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides -- This was such a disappointment after having read Middlesex last year. I’m sure I was so boring during all the hikes on my recent vacation to Banff, every once in a while going “AND ANOTHER THING,” re: this book at anyone who would listen. It’s a meandering, gloomy and overwrought novel about dumb, up-themselves kids, none of whom I gave two shits about, and to whom nothing of consequence ever happens. I figured out very early on that this was a book for philosophy majors and English majors, and pretty much nobody else, and also that if I could help it, I never wanted to talk to a philosophy major or an English major again in my life. Eugenides is very keen on showing off how much he’s read, and by extension how much his characters have read, and seems to feel very superior about it. I feel like I should feel some affinity for semiotics because it’s related to semantics (I remember having some philosophy majors in my semantics classes but it was mostly linguists) but nah it sounds like a waste of brain space. The best thing I could say for any of the characters is that eventually I mustered the energy to root for Madeleine to get out of her relationship with Leonard, so there’s one person I wasn’t actively rooting against all the time. She counterbalances it, however, by being a rich girl with inconsequential rich girl problems. Mitchell is definitely the worst of the bunch, being kind of the ultimate Nice Guy Who Got Friendzoned, and I’m honestly not too sure how much Eugenides wants us to feel bad for him on that point. His contribution to this story could be excised with basically no impact on the rest of the book. He goes travelling but never learns anything and doesn’t engage with his host countries the entire time, just being a directionless, superficial tourist the entire time. One of the scenes that stuck with me was when he fails to help the elderly dying man get to a toilet before the latter starts to poop, so it just goes everywhere and Mitchell just flees the place and never comes back. What a useless lump. The thing that really had me yelling about this book is that the only point on which I could relate to any of the main characters is how Leonard was going through a destructive phase during university due to his mental illness, which impacts his ability to keep up with classes and keep friends. That happened to me in undergrad and it’s not something I like thinking about it, it’s behind me and ruminating on it is one of my least favourite activities. So, yknow, thanks for that, book.

58. Don't Go Back to School by Kio Stark 59. The Awakening by Kate Chopin 60. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson 61. Extra Innings by Baseball Prospectus 62. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

63. Here We Are by Dorothy Parker -- This story is very lucky that it was written by a woman, and in any case, internalized misogyny is a thing, so that doesn’t get Parker off scot-free. It reminds me of the worst parts of the brilliant “Tous Les Mêmes” by Stromae, as well as the worst bits of every conservative family sitcom ever, where the woman finds every excuse she can to take offence (e.g. the groom expresses a slight preference for another hat the bride owns over the one she is currently wearing, and the bride claims on multiple occasions afterwards that he had said that she has terrible taste in hats) and women be crazy, and ugh. The saving graces of the story are the moments when the humour becomes more objective (instead of just tearing into this idiotic woman as a strawman of all wives everywhere), and Parker can still turn a phrase, at times sliiiightly reminiscent of Pratchett? And we know how much I like to be reminded of Pratchett.

64. The Misanthrope by Moliere

65. Bossypants by Tina Fey -- Soooo I don’t think I like Tina Fey? I didn’t have any strong feelings about her before reading this, beyond feeling favourable about her authorship of Mean Girls, an A+ flick for dang sure. After having read this, if anyone wants an explanation of cis straight white feminism, I would point to this book. Tina seems to have wanted this book to be feminist, but she does that by talking about the difficulties of being a rich, white, famous mom, and how her first period went, and how tough it was to have brown hair (???) when society values blondes so much more. There were two points in this book where Tina connected with me: a) after a very long stretch describing her teenage years during which she very obviously treated gay people like props, she explicitly fesses up to having treated gay people as props, and I was excited about the self-awareness she displayed; and b) there was this one line where she talks about having realized that she has old parents (relative to her own age) and that having realized that, she has worried about them ever since. Yep! Yep, Tina! We are on the same page there! But other than that, man. She has such a narrow definition of what can make a life difficult on a systemic level, that I just grew to resent her more and more. And, at the end of the day, it’s not a funny book. Which you would think would be the least this could manage.

66. The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett 67. The Stand by Stephen King 68. Grendel by John Gardner 69. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut 70. Persuasion by Jane Austen 71. Beowulf by Unknown 72. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown 73. Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James

2 notes · View notes