Dagrim's Tales

Just finished: Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, edited by Chrys Gorman. There are some really good stories in here and one good poem, and I'm cautiously optimistic for the future of the journal? I'm thinking a lot lately about didacticism in art and its purposes, and of course about writing dystopian fiction while living in a dystopia. There's the sort of "this thing that is happening is bad and you should be upset about it" kind of classic dystopia, and there's the hopepunk variant of "here are some people fighting against the bad thing?" but I think we ought to be pushing past both of those tendencies. To what end? I don't know. I'm thinking a lot about Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco, which sadly I have never seen staged but is one of the most brilliant explorations of fascism in the way that it weirds it and adds something new and useful to our understanding of fascist psychology, and thus our ability to resist it. (It is unfair, of course, to critique something for not being Ionesco.) So I dunno how to do that, I am a hack and a fraud. Anyway, there were a couple of really standout stories—one about a house contents sale, one with a retelling of Fall of Jericho, one about a group of church ladies resisting ICE, and of course the title story.

Currently reading: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. Adam is a Marxist artist and critic whose work I really enjoy, so when they came out with an actual book that I can recommend to people, I was all fuck yeah. This examines the relationship of art to capitalism and resistance, drawing on Benjamin, Fisher, Brecht, and so on. It gets points right off the bat for explaining uneven and combined development, which the Historical Materialism crowd is always on about, in a way my never-went-to-grad-school brain can actually understand. I just finished the bit on the ways in which conceptual art arose in rejection of the commercial art market and then almost immediately got subsumed into it. Anyway, it's really good.

 Just finished: Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman. Goddamn this was good. It's one of those dreamy, elegiac works where I'm at a loss to tell you exactly why it affected me that strongly (but honestly, read the plot summary I mentioned two weeks ago) and that's a critical part of its strength, the degree to which Fellman inhabits the story. I've seen a lot of post-apocalyptic, we're back to a lower technology level settings, but very few where the social and cultural changes affect the style (the other one is Ada Palmer, who is writing semi-utopian, higher-technology settings but does a similar thing where the prose evokes a more historical style but is off slightly, because it's the future). He's also doing a lot of work with biography and memory; there is one part where Griffon, reflecting on Etoine, describes him as cold, admits we've seen almost nothing of this, and suggests that he only really talks about his moments of passion in disproportion to how he was in regular life. This is very much a throw-you-into-the-deep-end type of book in terms of its worldbuilding, and even to some degree its characters. We never really find out who Yair was beyond the cross-dressing Jewish guy who took Etoine and Zaffre in when they moved to New York, and that he's dead and they still mourn him, and it doesn't matter, because it's outside of Griffon's scope and his parents don't like to talk about the past.

Okay, I think that actually nails down why it resonated with me so deeply. It reminds me of my grandparents—who, for the record, were not trans, were not revolutionaries or leftists in any way, and were not artistic—in the way that when they told stories, they would evade a great deal. Like a Turner painting where most of it is an ethereal abstract and you get maybe one section of specific detail. It was frustrating as a child, of course, never really knowing your family's story, and I think this is a pretty common experience and why everyone is so obsessed with genealogy and connecting with fifth cousins these days. I imagine even more so if you find out your parents were artist-revolutionaries in a magical city frozen in time. Anyway. I loved this one quite a bit.

It's Okay, Just Set Me On Fire by Billions Against Billionaires. This is a 'zine, which I wouldn't normally log except it's really good and I wanted to draw your attention to it. It's about how fascist billionaires suck. All the writing is quite strong and it includes a single-player Basilisk simulation RPG and you should get it for the cover alone. It was quietly slipped to me by a member of the collective who put it out and now my goal is to write something worthy of the second issue. Here it is.

Currently reading: Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, edited by Chrys Gorman. Well, the first story fuckin' whips. I mean, it's an anthology about how fascists suck. Maybe there's a broader rant I have about author/editor-led anthologies in general, because I keep having the same issues with them (see what I did there?) but it's a project worth doing anyway, and worth buying for the cover alone (so buy it).