#she blocked people who told her the quote she published was incomplete

[albonium]

omg she pisses me off so much playing the victim....

[chpinthestacks]

In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage: Shape-Shifting

I was in Iceland less than a day when I was told by an Icelander that if I went for a hike alone in the hills above Laugarvatn, I might see people who weren’t really there. The landscape conspired with perception, revealed visions. It was the quality of the light and lack of trees. What I wanted to see I’d see, the woman who ran the residency told me.  

The first week, I saw a child dancing but it was really a towel blowing on a laundry line.

The second week, I saw rocks jumping sideways through hills but the rocks were sheep. 

It was always daylight in Iceland in July, the sky perpetually soft-lit, and the light foreshortened the landscape. Eventually, I began to distrust my vision and felt a need to clarify what I’d just seen, look again.

Baltic-region mythology depicts stories about shape-shifters, the deception of sight. Icelandic hidden people—the unwashed children of Eve who she hid from God and who are invisible to humans—live in the hills of Iceland unless they choose to be seen. 

The Icelandic folk story “The Sealskin” is about a man who steals a sealskin, and who, upon returning to the site of his theft for more sealskin, finds, instead, a naked woman. She is weeping and he takes her to his house to console and clothe her. Years after his theft of her identity—the sealskin—after his abduction, after they marry and have children, he goes fishing one day and she finds her sealskin in a locked chest in their house. She puts it on and dives back into the sea, never to return.  

Pagan Scandinavian mythology is unabashedly brutal. There are child-stealers, jealous dead lovers, and in the story of “My Jawbones!” to stop the haunting of her hearth, a woman must bury the jawbones of a child she finds in her house.

In one Icelandic myth, a stranger comes to town and encounters bad weather, so he spends the night in the home of an older woman and her two young beautiful daughters. He asks the mother if he can take one of her daughters to bed and she agrees. In bed, he tries to have sex with the woman, but when he touches her, his hands move through her body. “I am a spirit with no body,” the woman explains. “You cannot get pleasure from me.” 

These misogynistic myths of the young woman, someone who is little more than a beautiful body, often alone, primed to be taken, have hung around. Some of the more violent Baltic region mythologies are about women alone in the woods and the bad things that happen to them because they are alone.

The first funeral I went to was my second cousin’s. She was murdered by a stranger after he abducted her. She was rollerblading home alone one dusk on Kittson County Road 1, a northern Minnesota county road flanked by golden grain.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s essay “Woven” discusses Laumes, Lithuanian water spirits who can take the form of animals and beautiful water-women. She writes: “Laumes were both benevolent and dangerous. They could tickle men to death and then eat their bodies. They could protect women and children or punish them brutally.” 

In the same essay, Yuknavitch writes about violence against women and the difficulty of depicting such violence. “In America, it’s tricky to describe violence without it turning into entertainment.”

As a child, I was told my mother’s father was French. More accurately, he was a Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish Jew raised in Nice, France, and later, Brooklyn. 

His mother went to Nice seeking refuge from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. There, she lived with her two sisters in a small flat where they worked as hat models in the city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. 

I inherited my grandfather’s photos after he passed. Beautiful women in hats. Other details about the sisters’ lives remain hazy. When I write about them I come up with more questions than answers, so this past feels closer to mythology to me, to a set of exaggerated familial beliefs, some, perhaps, fictitious. This was Europe, late 1930s, and they were Jews who escaped to America. In Nice, some versions of the story go, they changed their names and assumed Christian identities. In Nice, they lived as themselves and as false selves. They shape-shifted.  

Intermediate spirits in Icelandic folktales, those who can shape-shift, are depicted, often, as beautiful women. The moral point of the shape-shift narrative is connected to punishment, to reveal dubious or desperate transformation and its consequence. It’s a relational trope reliant on a quality of before and after. Like a good secret, shape-shifting acquires its gravity by what it conceals and promises to expose later. Across cultures and mythologies, some shape-shifters are more deceptive or punitive, many are humiliated for their transgressions, some symbolize inner conflict, such as the werewolf who changes to reveal his true self. In some shape-shifting narratives, once a character takes on a new form, it becomes impossible to change back.

In a 2008 Grand Forks Herald article about my second cousin’s murder, a friend of hers describes how no women or children went biking or skating alone after her murder on the rural straightaway. It would be a betrayal to her memory, her friend said, to do these things alone now.  

In Nice, when Nazi’s found out that my great-grandmother’s sister had been assuming a Christian name, they murdered her children in front of her but let her live. The memory of that sight would be her punishment.

John Berger defines sight as the thing that comes before words. To Berger, the relationship between sight and knowledge is never settled and always relational, mediated by perspective, by sight relative to position. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, on the photography of atrocities, writes that “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed.” Certainly narrative does this work of possession too and I feel the edges of shape-shifting as I write this: anything I say about grief or loss is my singular possession, incomplete and mediated, reflecting my flawed sight. What are the details I’ve included, the details I’ve left out? For you, reader, I objectify my experiences and lay claim to those of my family. I mold, omit, and transgress the past.

But the violence is real, the vulnerability that hangs around the edges of sight. Yesterday, I learned from a neighborhood community message board that a white man driving a gold car tried to abduct a child my son’s age two blocks from our home. When I walk the dog tonight, I stare down every honey-hued sedan, try to see inside every car, to every man I don’t trust, but I can’t. Dusk has turned the windshields to mirrored glass.  

In her essay “The Precarious” from her recent collection, The Reckonings, Lacy M. Johnson writes, “both autopsy and atrocity require a witness—someone who survives, who sees for herself, with her own eyes. But the violence changes the person who looks.”

One day I went for a hike alone in the hills above Laugarvatn. The hills were steep and mossy and rocky. All the people I saw were tourists like me in bunchy jackets and hiking boots. I was grieving and lonely and wanted something revealed to me. I knew this was ridiculous, but I wanted it anyway. Some unnamable more, some sight or being to lure me away from pain. In some shape-shifting stories, the mother appears and beckons the child home. Sometimes, this isn’t the mother, but a dubious figure able to assume the mother’s form. Instead, in the hills above Laugarvatn, behind mossy lava rocks, there were clumps of used toilet paper. A woman’s torn ticket stub from her flight to Iceland from Tel Aviv.

On a gray day at The Skagaströnd Museum of Prophecies, I gave every Króna in my wallet to a fortuneteller to look at my hands and face so she could see into the privacy of my nature, my past, reveal truths I couldn’t yet see.

Notes: Works used to research this post include John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Lydia Yuknavitch’s essay “Woven” originally published in Guernica, and Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings. The folktales and quoted excerpts come from Jacqueline Simpson’s Icelandic Folktales and Legends and Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir’s The Trolls in the Knolls. The Sontag quote can be found on page 81 in Regarding the Pain of Others and the Lacy M. Johnson quote can be found on page 28 in The Reckonings.

[artemisreads]

Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

First published in 1949 (and by Penguin in 2003), Nineteen Eighty Four is available as a Penguin Classic for just under 10 Australian dollars in most Australian bookstores and online. Usually content warning are at the end but given that I discuss them in the review I’m putting them above the cut. Warning for torture, death and rape.

As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arm reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

‘she’s beautiful’ he murmured.

‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.

‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.

A novel of ‘what could have been’, this novel follows the perfectly unremarkable Winston Smith (remarkably subtle name choice there...) as he lives within a totalitarian system of English Socialism (or Ingsoc). Coming into power during WWII, altering the past to align with what the omnipresent Party do today, he displays aptitude for his job despite secret inner feelings of hatred towards them and their ever watching figure head Big Brother. He meets Julia and despite immediately hating her, to the point of wanting to rape and kill her because she was young and pretty and he would never have her, they end up having a secret love affair with the knowledge that it will one day ruin them.

The backbone of good writing is good characters, you may not like them, but it’s an author’s job to make sure you know them, maybe not everything, but understand at least the way they act. They are the eyes through which you view their world. This is usually helped along by the situation characters find themselves in, and indeed it is easy to understand the way Winston acts in such an austere environment. His questioning, his fear, are very relatable. And then there’s Julia. Julia does not read as a character meant to be relatable or sympathised with, if she can be called a character at all. She is an accessory. Winston’s limited reflection on Julia places her attitude to life within Oceania beneath his, she sees the Party as immutable, but finds ways to take pleasure and exist within it without ever wondering why. Why is Winston’s biggest question, why would the Party be like this? Why does the Party exist at all? He tells Julia she is ‘only a rebel from the waist down’, and she finds this ‘terribly witty’ and we’re left wondering why Julia is so engaged by the common man (and I do mean common) embodied by Winston.

But even Winston questions Julia’s motives, why should she be interested in him? He is old, ugly and somewhat sickly. The simple answer is the one Julia gives, she doesn’t care about any of that, presumably because she just likes sex and human connection and doesn’t really care who gives it, and that Winston is special because he sees through the Party, but the truest answer is because Orwell has written a symbol of all an average (but enlightened and therefor above average) man wants and expects to find. She performs as the perfect citizen for the Party without believing in what it says, and in doing so becomes the perfect woman in Winston’s eyes, being young and attractive didn’t hurt either. I do not think Orwell intended Julia to be an object, in the way that many men think they don’t think of women as objects, but still consider them a single monolith or maybe imagine a few archetypes they all fit into.

This book is far older than me, written in a not so different, but rawer climate just after WWII, so I remind myself to be bit more gentle than I usually would in regards to Winston’s general reflection and philosophising on the world, the nature of the past and its ability to be mutable, and immutable at the same time (which is only a problem to spend literally most of your adult life wondering about if you never take your head out of your arse to consider that things happen whether you know about them or not, and you KNOW this, because you know the Party, and it’s your job to change records people will never see and write stories about people who never existed and no one will ever hear of, except your superior. But I’m rambling.). I am sure that when this book was first published it was considered an important and intelligent work, and indeed there are some (but not all) agreeable and important messages regarding being critical of the government, and what seems heavy handed and so pointedly obvious now might have actually been new and powerful, but the way Orwell uses women is infuriating. They are not people, ever, only things to be remarked upon, and most of the time, hated.

As a woman, in the 21st century, Orwell’s and his character Winston’s musings are a bit unbearable. If Winston Smith had a tumblr, most of his posts would be reblogged with the “it’s not that deep” picture attached. If he had a reddit, I’m told he’d be linked to the ‘I’m 14 and this is deep’ thread. The quoted passage opener, written in stark contrast to the totalitarian Party’s erasure of sex and human connection, goes on for a bit more than two pages, with Winston comparing this woman to Julia, and then just ‘philosophising’ over just her for a bit longer. The passage revels in the ‘natural’ beauty of a woman allowed to fulfil her natural function and role within life, making children and being a caretaker and maid for eternity, which is very strange, because this is what women of the Party are meant to do as well, but in a clinical joyless way. Winston is personally offended by the way his wife flinches from his touch, but insists on once a week ‘doing her duty to the Party’. As it turns out Orwell may have been right about it not mattering what kind of government is in charge, women will always be treated as objects in nature rather than fully human persons participating actively in the world.

This book is a man’s account of what it might be like to be a man under totalitarian socialism, presented as a cautionary tale and deep reflection of political unrest, that should ordinary but aware men let power become too absolute there can be no revolution. It seems to say it is important to be critical and aware of your governments actions (and that all governments are more or less the same, no matter the ideology), but also gives the impression that there is nothing that one can do with this knowledge, which seems rather weak for such a revolutionary book.

Winston has a small deep seated sense of being incomplete, like there is more to life than being kept on the edge of poverty and being employed by the party who keep it that way, but doesn’t do much about it except drink, until he meets Julia. The horrendous way the Party keeps power, and the constant knowledge that anyone you know, at any moment, may suddenly cease to exist (in society at least, they all know the person now exists in a cell being tortured and brainwashed and then maybe killed) doesn’t seem to touch him any more than as a nagging feeling that surely, life has been, and could be better, than it is. This resigned attitude removes us from the power of what is happening, it makes what the Party does seem less horrible. Intellectually we know that what is happening is bad, but Winston’s view, and Orwell’s writing, make it hard to feel. I’m a sensitive person, I grieve over fictional happenings a lot -I still wonder if the girls from Saddle Club grew into people that they wanted to be, but this book did not make me feel. Even when I turn the books happenings to true events (particularly East Germany during the cold war) I do not feel the horror or shock at being taken from your bed into a cellar and tortured for weeks.

As I stated before, I’m sure this book was gripping and powerful in its day, but I have read (and will review) other books dealing with similar themes of government control, socialism v capitalism, and the feeling of being a powerless citizen that are much more visceral and poignant.

I’d only recommend this book to a male libertarian (if I for some reason wanted to let him continue feeling smug in his knowledge that all governments are bad and not remind him women are people) or if I knew you very well and we wanted to have a groan filled gossip book review date, which I am open to, by the way.