So far today I have called several doctors and am hoping not to have to fight with my insurance, since that would be absolutely a fun time right now. Have some further Readercon flotsam.
1. In the general department of getting used to my face, I feel I might look less like an effigy if my eyes weren't closed, but I'm still glad![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch in his Twitter-searching ran across this photo. (I believe we were all listening to teri.zin saying something resonant and smart.)
2. Forashnistrike: the point is not that I didn't get placed on this panel at Readercon, the point is that I liked my answer to the question of what anti-fascist aesthetics might look like and since I didn't get a chance to field-test it on a captive audience, I'm field-testing it on a captive audience.
I don't believe that I have a silver bullet for fascism any more than the next person who would like a road map out of our new international nightmare, but the deep unreal nostalgia of it has struck me more than once; as an aesthetic it is so dependent on imaginary constructions of the past (Aryan purity, Roman nationalism, Little England, MAGA) that just the act of remembering the world as it was can feel like radical pushback. Fascism sells simple stories: this is what a real person looks like. That's the source of your troubles, all of them right there. In the good old days, everyone knew their place. Anti-fascism reminds of the complexity, the plurality of the historical past as well as the present—the women who fought, the men who wept, the non-white civilizations, the queerness everywhere. Fascism is sleek and seamless and streamlined, there's a reason it ate the Italian Futurists alive: it buffs the surface to such a high gloss, who'd want to look under the hood? I would expect anti-fascism to turn over every rock it can get, to show you the moving parts, the structures, the intricacy and the work of being alive. When fascism trumpets that only the fittest survive, anti-fascism should note Darwin's theory of sexual selection—in which aesthetics and female choice play far more of a part than simple survivalism—and be aggressively kind. It might be a cut-up aesthetic, a lot of it might be handmade, it should never be so artisanal that it disappears up its own gentrification and never anti-intellectual, because fascism hates thinking. It should know how to listen. It should value what Bundism called doikayt—hereness, the world we live in, the world we share—over some narrow brutal dream that never even was real. What would that look like in speculative fiction? It might look like the space opera of Yoon Ha Lee, the secondary-world fantasy of Rose Lemberg, the cosmic horror of Ruthanna Emrys. Niceness is optional, compassion a must. Above all, because fascism is such an aesthetic of hatred and fear, anti-fascism should welcome the Other, which is what each of us is to one another anyway. Anti-fascist aesthetics certainly looked like Le Guin.
3. I believe this is the line I was trying to remember from Lloyd Alexander's The Beggar Queen (1984): "'The world is absurd,' Keller told Sparrow. 'Thank heaven for that. Otherwise, I—we, that is—would have no occupation.'"
1. In the general department of getting used to my face, I feel I might look less like an effigy if my eyes weren't closed, but I'm still glad
spatch in his Twitter-searching ran across this photo. (I believe we were all listening to teri.zin saying something resonant and smart.)2. For
ashnistrike: the point is not that I didn't get placed on this panel at Readercon, the point is that I liked my answer to the question of what anti-fascist aesthetics might look like and since I didn't get a chance to field-test it on a captive audience, I'm field-testing it on a captive audience.I don't believe that I have a silver bullet for fascism any more than the next person who would like a road map out of our new international nightmare, but the deep unreal nostalgia of it has struck me more than once; as an aesthetic it is so dependent on imaginary constructions of the past (Aryan purity, Roman nationalism, Little England, MAGA) that just the act of remembering the world as it was can feel like radical pushback. Fascism sells simple stories: this is what a real person looks like. That's the source of your troubles, all of them right there. In the good old days, everyone knew their place. Anti-fascism reminds of the complexity, the plurality of the historical past as well as the present—the women who fought, the men who wept, the non-white civilizations, the queerness everywhere. Fascism is sleek and seamless and streamlined, there's a reason it ate the Italian Futurists alive: it buffs the surface to such a high gloss, who'd want to look under the hood? I would expect anti-fascism to turn over every rock it can get, to show you the moving parts, the structures, the intricacy and the work of being alive. When fascism trumpets that only the fittest survive, anti-fascism should note Darwin's theory of sexual selection—in which aesthetics and female choice play far more of a part than simple survivalism—and be aggressively kind. It might be a cut-up aesthetic, a lot of it might be handmade, it should never be so artisanal that it disappears up its own gentrification and never anti-intellectual, because fascism hates thinking. It should know how to listen. It should value what Bundism called doikayt—hereness, the world we live in, the world we share—over some narrow brutal dream that never even was real. What would that look like in speculative fiction? It might look like the space opera of Yoon Ha Lee, the secondary-world fantasy of Rose Lemberg, the cosmic horror of Ruthanna Emrys. Niceness is optional, compassion a must. Above all, because fascism is such an aesthetic of hatred and fear, anti-fascism should welcome the Other, which is what each of us is to one another anyway. Anti-fascist aesthetics certainly looked like Le Guin.
3. I believe this is the line I was trying to remember from Lloyd Alexander's The Beggar Queen (1984): "'The world is absurd,' Keller told Sparrow. 'Thank heaven for that. Otherwise, I—we, that is—would have no occupation.'"
