I Wrote a Book

Many years ago at this point I remember turning to my husband and saying, "I think I can write a book someday." It seemed like a bit of a pipe dream, as I was still partway through my PhD program, and hadn't even settled on a dissertation topic.

And yet! Here we are! I wrote both a dissertation and now a book. It took like six years! It's got a title I don't particularly like, but is full of spiffy keywords so people can find it easily when researching. All the more important in the world of eBooks and the inability to browse shelves, I imagine. So, here's Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity. 

Pretty! The image is from Rachel Whiteread's Vienna Holocaust Memorial

You can read the official fancy phrasing at the link above, and also hit my author profile, if you go to the Routledge link. However, the quick and dirty description of the book is that tolerance is a rather useless goal for multicultural education, because it gives no actual suggestions for action in the face of discrimination. Tolerance discourse also easily falls apart once power structures no longer encourage it as a behavior or ideal. This is all the more important in Trump's America. It's a book about much more than Holocaust literature, although it also offers suggestions for how to find and analyze books on European Jews, Romani, the Disabled, Gay Men, and Neo-Nazis.

Anyway, I hope you'll consider asking your library to purchase it. There's a discount code now of FLR40 which will give you 20% off.

Pokemon Go(es) to Auschwitz

While I think I'm wrapping up my time writing about the Holocaust (final book deadline is 9/21, release date is late 2016 or early 2017) I can't stay away from some stories.

Who remembers the "selfies at Auschwitz" controversy of 2014? Or from 20 years before that the "someone laughed during Schindler's List" controversy? I'm going to touch on these very briefly in order to contextualize the current Pokemon Go kerfuffle. TL:DR is teenagers sometimes act in ways that make their elders all judgy. But for reals, what they're doing isn't that different than what oldsters do. But games are maybe different than selfies.

I've actually long wanted to comment on the incident where "69 students were evicted from the theater because some of them laughed and talked while Holocaust horrors were on screen."  This actually prompted a visit from director Steven Spielberg to the Oakland high school responsible for taking their class to see Schindler's List. There are several good defenses listed in the articles above. The one I want to focus on, however, is the idea of an inappropriate emotional response. Of course, we shouldn't laugh when someone gets shot on screen, right? And extra, extra we shouldn't laugh when it's a Holocaust victim, yes? Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that these students' behavior was worth universal derision. If we think about the ways in which emotional responses are policed within American culture, especially for boys/men, is it really surprising that laughter replaces distress in a moment like this? Particularly in a large group where performing masculinity is essential to one's cultural cache? The argument I want to make here is that both the laughter and the selfies are moments where individuals try to process their emotional experience within (restrictive) cultural norms.

So, flash forward 20 years. Can we have this same discussion when facing the reality that kids take selfies at Auschwitz? What's the emotional response (and record thereof) that is appropriate when visiting a death camp? I want to briefly consider the following images, gathered from a Google image search of various combinations of tourist/picture/portrait/Auschwitz.

A sunny day, a vacation picture, a death camp on the horizon.

A family portrait with crowds of tourists, a location that could be anywhere.

So...are these images acceptable because they are portraits, rather than selfies? Is it the presumed egotism of the selfie that causes the controversy? These groups aren't smiling or making the dreaded duck face. But neither are they clearly expressing shock and distress, the presumed "appropriate" reaction.

Photographer sees you, seeing and photographing Auschwitz.

What about that one time when basically every European major league football team visited Auschwitz while wearing matching uniforms? And were then photographed? Pictured  is team Italy, but you can find pictures of team Sweden and team Germany as well. Not everyone wore warm-up suits, but they did all match, and were clearly there for some promotional learning.

Alamy Stock Photo #G7PBJM

Or how about an Auschwitz stock photo? 

What I'm getting at here is that there isn't a good way to photograph oneself at a place like Auschwitz. The impulse is to track and process our experiences in all of these images, or to imagine and purchase what that experience might be like in the case of the stock photo. How are selfies different?

The one that broke the internet.

The photo above got the most traction, with articles featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, and others. It's actually a perfect storm for those who want to attack one or many of the following: teenagers, young women, social media users, emoji users, tourists, people who like pink. Yet Princess B here is doing nothing so very different than the portraits seen above, tracking, processing, and representing our experience of a terrible place. Teenagers do it differently and more publicly than their predecessors, possibly. But I'm willing to bet there are a slew of photo albums and slide carousels that hold smiling death camp visitors, processing and tracking their experience as well.

This one, including the tag "Arbeit Mach Freiiiiiiiiiiiii" faced its own unique derision
as it came from a group of Israeli teenagers.

The image above looks a little like it could be a boy-band album cover. The faces have been politely blurred (whcih maybe I should have done here as well, but I'm commenting on facial expressions, so...) Yet this doesn't seem that different than many of the images of footballers participating in promotional tours of the death camp. 
In fact, a search of "tourists crying at Auschwitz" produces no significant image results. I'm not surprised. When I was busy crying in one of those reflection areas at the USHMM the last thing I wanted was a picture. Yet I may have photographed myself out front (may have even taken a selfie) before or after the visit, documenting that I was there.

Ah, but what of Pokemon Go at Auschwitz? Or at the USHMM? I don't like it. No, sir, I don't. But I'm trying to figure out why I feel differently about this. Isn't Pokemon just another way of processing the world? How is it different than a selfie?

Pokemon @ Auschwitz 7/11/16

It's not like I can claim "distraction" as the reason why it's bad. After all, posting to social media is in it's own way distracting. Everyone will pretty much take a peek at what their friends are doing if they log in to post a selfie. Our focus slips. away from the space in front of us and towards the world of the interwebs, and friends, and others' selfies. So that's not it.

The mediation of memory is part of it. There's an anonymity to it that feels weird to me in a way that the selfie or uncomfortable laughter at Spielberg doesn't. I think the biggest problem, however, is tucked away in the slogan itself: "Gotta Catch 'Em All." Pokemon Go is an experience you have everywhere. Or can have, or try to have, as you pursue all of them. 

Memorials, by their very nature, are not everywhere spaces. They have been set aside in order to emphasize a particularity of experience. When you take a selfie at a memorial, you're still documenting a place and your relationship to it. When you catch a Pokemon, you mark an experience that you've had at a park, a grocery store, your neighbor's backyard, and then move on to the next one. It's not a process, but a pursuit. The mediation makes them one and the same, coupled with a sense of triumph that feels counterintuitive to the goals of the memorial. 

For the record, I'm not anti-Pokemon. Go forth and triumph. Just maybe not at Auschwitz. 

Hey-yo.

And because you made it all the way to the end, here's my best duck-face selfie (which is not very good, I kept laughing), in front of a disturbing painting in my living room. Still, while it references slavery and lynchings, my house is not a memorial to those things. So feel free to come catch a Wartorle over here.

A Book that Became a TV Show

It seems only appropriate that my blog on Outlander, the late 80s romance novel recently revived as a STARZ series, include some moving images and thus, I give you my first GIF blog. May it be as hilarious as the one on 50 Shades of Gray. (Probably not. That's a pretty great review.)

So, the first thing to keep in mind is that when reading Outlander I picture the love interest like this:

Hey, ladies.

In a kilt. With more chest hair, of course. It's 1742 and they haven't invented waxing yet. (Or have they? Book 2 implies yes...) So, this is Jamie in my mind's eye. He's great. He's a romance novel hero! Of course he's great! He's perfect. Just like Thor.

I found Outlander for like $3 on Amazon Kindle, knew some friends who liked it, and decided to give it a try. I did not, at first, know it was a romance novel. I figured this out once I spotted the Outlander Coloring Book at B&N. (Clearly, early in my reading of it, as it becomes completely obvious later.) However, I've read my Janice Radway and know what's up. Romance novels have a lot more to offer than merely repressive patriarchal representations, right?

Right.

I read Outlander really quickly, considering it comes in at like 800 pages or something. And here we come to my first issue with the book. This book really needed a much better editor. Gabaldon excuses some of the faults by repeatedly saying she never expected anyone would read the book, and thus, the oddities are only natural (paraphrasing from the interview in the back of my TV tie-in edition). Fair enough. But, that's what editors are for.

Another extended description of Scottish politics? Come on! 

Gabaldon obviously did a lot of research for the book. But research doesn't make up for lack of good plotting. Here's the deal. Your main character is sucked back in time through a crazy ladies only (?) portal, She falls in love so much that she's willing to give up toilets for the rest of her life. And hot baths, which are mentioned much more often.

I mean, I guess I'd give up modern plumbing for this?

However, once she finally tells her 18th Century Scottish now-husband about her time traveling ways it plays out like this "I told him. Told him everything, haltingly but coherently." I mean, come on! This is the most interesting thing that has happened so far, the biggest challenge to their relationship, or trust, or whatever. She tells him "everything," he responds with "Aye, I believe ye, Sassenach" and that's that.

So, you say you were born in 1918, eh? 

Similarly, at the end of the book Clare gets a chance to tell Jamie about the effing wolf she killed with her bare hands. Again: "I told him the things I had had no chance to tell him; about the wolf [...] He pressed my face into his shoulder and rocked me while I sobbed." 

Again?

Gabaldon seems to have difficulty deciding if she wants Clare to be a badass or not. And when she gets the chance to show Jamie how she's been a badass in his absence she often fails. Then there's the whole corporal punishment thing. I can't even count how many pages of explanations of Jamie getting beaten by one relative or another I read. It all feels like a giant excuse for the one time he "has" to beat Clare (disobeying orders, endangering others, whatever). At some point someone should have stepped in and been like "look, we get it, already." 

There's also the question of how much pleasure Jamie takes in beating (her words, repeatedly, not mine) Clare.

Gabaldon skirts around the idea of S&M repeatedly, never settling on if she's going to "go there" or not. I don't know. I just felt like there was way too much apology over and over and OVER again for the one scene. Whatever. We get it already. Codes of conduct, Jamie is still a good guy, even if he's just a tiny bit of a sadist. Because maybe he did enjoy it? Or maybe he didn't? Anyway, he promises to never do it again after blah blah blah reasons. 

Of course, the perfect Jamie needs a foil, and thus we have the decisively sadistic Jack Randall. He's everything that Jamie isn't, while packaged in the eerie likeness of Clare's 20th century husband, Frank.

Yeah, I know.

Jack is presented as a sick perverted dude, in no small part because he wants Jamie. I'm quite troubled by Gabaldon's portrayal of Jack's sexual desires as universally repellent, whether they are for his brother, women he wants to traumatize, or just men in general. One of these things is not like the others, and yet they're presented as though they are all of a piece. This is a flaw in the story itself, and one that can't be cleaned up by good editing. There's unsavory ideology at work behind some corners of Outlander, and none of it really has to do with Jamie's 18th century attitudes towards physical punishment. 

Everything needed trimmed, a lot. Less Highland politics, less contextualization of physical punishment, less...stuff.

Witch burning too? Really?

All of this said, I enjoyed Outlander. It was okay, and I can understand why STARZ thought it was a good thing to bring to TV. It's like Game of Thrones lite. There's violence and sex and intrigue, but also cuddles. I tried reading Dragonfly in Amber, but when my library copy was due I didn't bother to renew it. How can a time-travel romance novel be so boring, you may ask? Well, it was mostly missing this: 

More kilt, though. 

I rarely read romance novels (thus my inability to recognize Outlander as one at first!) so I have no real recommendations of what to read instead. But there must be more tightly plotted and inventive books out there, and those with less homophobia and more badassery. Right?

Book by a LGBT Author

Another text that could fulfill a few categories. Longer than 500 pages, one word in the title, and also a LGBT author. Nicola Griffith and Sarah Waters are both known for including lesbian relationships in their work, but it's less central in Hild than in Fingersmith. While I wouldn't, at all, call Fingersmith a book "about" lesbianism/lesbians/lesbian relationships/whatever, that is one of the core elements of the text. I think of it as not as motivating the plot as much as being the underlying heart of the book, if that makes sense. It's always in the background, subtly moving things along while the main scam takes place.

So what is it about? Scams and scam artists. The primary scam is to separate a wealthy heiress from her fortune by first marrying her and then committing her to a madhouse. Two crooks from London's Victorian underbelly, Susan "Smith" and Richard Rivers, plan to separate the innocent Maud from her fortune. Susan will keep 1/3 for the trouble of functioning as a lady's maid while Mr. Rivers woos Maud away from her Uncle's house. And that's all I'm telling you. This isn't a spoiler, as the scam is planned in like the first 30 pages.

This book was addicting. I couldn't really read it before bed because I had such a hard time putting it down once I started. It's got a delicious Gothic feel to it: the crumbling mansion, the horrible Uncle and innocent niece, and the isolation of an English country house. Mean servants, cold rooms, you know the drill. It's also got a lovely Dickensian quality to it with the house full of canny crooks that gives birth to Susan and Mr. Rivers' plot. And did I mention a madhouse? There's one of those too. Anyway, the atmosphere, the growing complexity of the relationship between Maud and Susan, and the tension of the scam all make it so fun. You should absolutely read it. I don't want to say anymore because spoilers. Just go. Read it. Now.

I've read two more of Waters' books since I finished this (hey, I had a book to write, I'm behind on blogging). The Little Stranger and now Affinity which I'm nearly done with. Little Stranger was a bit disappointing. Maybe I read it too closely on the heels of Haunting of Hill House? I find that book terrifying and the ghosts of Little Stranger didn't grab me as effectively. Affinity is enjoyable, but it's no Fingersmith. So my official Waters recommendation will be Fingersmith fo' sho'.  Also, apparently the director of Oldboy, Chan-wook Park is making a Korean adaptation of this. That seems like it will be nuts.