Wednesday 28 August 2024

Todo eso que no sé cómo explicarle a mi madre

by Sandra Bravo

I truly wanted to love Todo eso. Starting with the title and the phrase in its very beginning [1, p. 11]:

Si «cisgénero» te suena a chino, «poliamor» a orgías de pervertidos o eres mi madre, consulta el glosario que encontrarás al final de este libro.

I was looking forward to a blast of a book.

“But,” interrupts the perspicacious reader. “I can distinctly hear ‘but’. You wanted to love it but.”

The thing is, during the past few years, I read and enjoyed a number of books on the topic [26], some of them good and some others pretty damn good. Perhaps inevitably, I judge Todo eso against a rather high standard. So let me continue, and you’ll see if there’s a ‘but’.

We read for different reasons. One of them is to increase our knowledge. In this sense, there was little new for me to be learned from this book. (This is not the author’s fault.) For sure, there were new names, new books, a couple of concepts that I never read about in Spanish before, etc. etc. However, talking about genuinely new (for me) ideas, I would name one, coming from Luce Irigaray [1, p. 64 and clarified in the footnote 54]: Amo a te / J’aime à toi / Amo a ti, awkwardly translated to English as “I Love to You”.

Another reason is to see the author’s perspective and check how much (or how little) we have in common. I found myself agreeing with many of Sandra’s opinions — say, on homonormativity or sex work — and was glad to encounter references to familiar works, e.g. Yes, we fuck! [1, p. 115].

Yet one more reason to read is simply to take pleasure in it. Todo eso, in part, fulfilled the promise to be a fun read. Of course, it could be that this promise was imagined by me. I enjoyed the Chapter 2, Confesiones a la Virgen de una desvirgada, the most.

It’s OK to cherrypick. This is not a novel, not a prog-rock album, not a “take it or leave it” menú del día.

Now what could have been done better?*

  • Citations, citations and more citations. Sandra quotes profusely from a variety of (mostly feminist) writers. Sometimes the passages take more than a half of page, sometimes more than two pages [1, pp. 52—54, 102—104, 111—113]. What for? In many cases, they are long-winded and boring bits of text, clearly meant to support the author’s arguments. As it happens, these latter are enunciated much better, in short sentences and a lively language.
  • Solution: I’d say, ditch most of the quotes, shorten the essential ones, leave the references in the footnotes (as they currently are) and let the reader decide if they want to dig deeper. Naturally, the book will be twice as short then, about 100 pages. Good!
  • For a such a short book it’s quite repetitive. Sandra goes on in loops about her privileges, her sexuality, cisheteropatriarchy and her idea of feminism which is also anti-racist, anti-capacist and anti-capitalist. No matter how important these issues are to the author, repeating makes them less so to the reader.
  • Solution: saying once is enough; cut the repeats, maybe we’ll have 80 pages or so in the end.
  • In spite of all “own experience” and “being an exhibitionist” spiel, Sandra shares surprisingly little of that experience. For instance, she writes [1, p. 79]:
    He tenido sexo con centenares de hombres cis, y no muchos me han sorprendido. En cambio, mujeres sexualmente desinhibidas, aunque inferiores in cifra, eran mucho más abiertas, creativas y libres de complejos.
    Hundreds of men, what a perseverance! I guess most would give up after the first half dozen of them. Still, at least some of those cis men must have surprised the author, why not to tell us? And what about those “lower in quantity”, higher quality women? Alas, she doesn’t go much beyond generalisations like above.
  • Solution: a few real-life anecdotes to illustrate the author’s points will do wonders as well as pad the book up. Spare us the graphic details; these examples don’t even have to be about sex. Check out Más peligroso es no amar [3] and Mujeres que follan [6] for inspiration.
  • Now we are coming to the most cringeworthy part: Chapter 7, Y lo más importante de todo, ¿cómo le explico yo esto a mi madre?, in particular Carta a mi madre. This last chapter confirms my worst fears: Ms Bravo indeed has no clue how to explain the titular “all this” to her mum. Why on earth did she choose the open letter form then? It’s painfully embarrassing to read. How about just talk to her mum or, failing that, write a normal (closed, personal) letter?
  • Solution: do us a favour, lose Carta a mi madre.
  • Finally, the bit that was in fact promised: the Glossary. What a disappointment! Typically, authors include glossaries to provide the reader with definitions in order to avoid terminological confusion. Here it seems to exacerbate the confusion. The terms patriarchy and queer, Sandra says, are difficult to define. Instead of explaining attachment in her own words, she “clarifies” it with yet another abstruse quote which actually describes attachment theory (without defining what attachment is). In the entry for LGTBIQ+, she writes that if you don’t know what a “lesbian” or “gay” is, you’ll have difficulties understanding her book. Family is what a heterosexual couple achieves after practicing intercourse without a condom for a period of time. And so on.
  • Solution: make the definitions clear and concise. (Like the author’s definition of feminism: a fight for the elimination of any kind of oppression. It’s not required that everybody agrees with them.) Define basic concepts such as sex and gender before moving on more complex ones. Avoid emotional comments and finishing sentences with “vamos” — there’s whole book for that kind of thing. Make sure that the use of the terms in the main text is consistent with their definitions.
  • By the way, (ab)using the term “person” and avoiding “woman”, as is done in the Glossary, does a great disservice to feminism. Not that Sandra is unaware of it: elsewhere, she describes how replacing “gender violence” with “domestic violence” is employed by the far right to invisibilise the problem [1, pp. 47—50]. She also emphasises the need of safe places specifically and exclusively for women, not persons [1, pp. 114—115].
  • Solution: the obvious one. Say “man” or “woman” when needed.

See? There are problems; I suggest solutions. And did I use the word “but” (apart from right now, that is)?

I doubt that the author, in the unlikely event of reading this post, would heed my free and disinterested advice. Which is a bloomin’ shame really.


* Everybody has their own criteria of what is “good” (and, by extension, “better”). Some readers might have liked the bits that bothered me the most. As this is my blog, I express here my opinions what is better for the reader.
I wonder if the author is conscious that the sheer length of these citations is stretching the right to quote a tad too far.
Clara Serra explains this brilliantly in her Manual ultravioleta [5, chapter 16].

References

  1. Bravo, S. Todo eso que no sé cómo explicarle a mi madre: (Poli)amor, sexo y feminismo. Ediciones Plan B, 2021.
  2. Casquet, N. and Andyn. Mala mujer: La revolución que te hará libre. Lunwerg, 2020.
  3. Etxebarria, L. Más peligroso es no amar: Poliamor y otras muchas formas de relación sexual y amorosa en el siglo XXI. Aguilar, 2016.
  4. Requena Aguilar, A. Feminismo vibrante: Si no hay placer no es nuestra revolución. Roca Editorial, 2020.
  5. Serra, S. Manual ultravioleta: Feminismo para mirar el mundo. Ediciones B, 2019.
  6. Teruel, A. Mujeres que follan: Historias de sexo real contadas por ellas. Libros del K.O., 2023.

Saturday 17 August 2024

Record of a Spaceborn Few

by Becky Chambers

I enjoyed The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit. With this sidequel of sorts, though, I was up to disappointment.

Like CCO, the novel is written as a series of short unnumbered chapters named after their (recurring) protagonists. So all of them are called either Eyas or Isabel or Kip or Sawyer or Tessa. Great for navigating. In the first half of the book, there is practically no connection between the five plotlines; also, no plotlines to speak about. It doesn’t help that all five characters are dull as ditchwater.

The language irritates me no end. The use of politically correct “xe/xyr” pronouns started grating on my sensory organs in the first two books already. Here, the abuse of monosyllabic vocabulary (cred, hex, hud, kick, mek, scrib, sim, vid, vox, etc.) makes the text ridiculously reminiscent of Joey’s “sup with the whack” classic — except it is meant to be serious. Every time a character says “stars” (Exodan equivalent of “heavens to Murgatroyd”), which happens roughly every other page, you’ll want to roll your eyes. As if this wasn’t enough, RSF will drain the life out of you with its endless moralising.

Let’s be fair: it is not all bad. The best bit is a chapter called Eyas where — guess who? — a woman called Eyas goes to one of the tryst clubs, which apparently are part of Exodan welfare system. I liked it. I think everybody would be better off if the author wrote a whole book just about that.

Wednesday 14 August 2024

Palas cántabras

I bought this pair of vintage wooden rackets (palas cántabras) last year on a flea market in Santander for €3. It took me a good while but I’ve finally decorated them with acrylic paints.


Starfish


Seashell


Brittle star


Sea urchins

Wood, acrylic paint. More photos of rackets @ Shutterstock.

Tuesday 6 August 2024

Sci-Fi Shorts II

by Mark Roman and Corben Duke

A follow-up to the 2018 Sci-Fi Shorts. This time I actually paid for a Kindle book so, I thought, it better be good. And it indeed was. As I was reading it during the Euro 2024, I found the footie references (Magi-water, Intuition, Spy Human) especially timely, while Quick Sale provides a simple yet efficient solution to all problems of humankind. I leave it up to you to discover why it’s a bad idea — always was — to keep Harry Potter books in the house. Nuff said: you can read the first story, Tunnel Vision, on a preview in its entirety, and decide if you really want more of this stuff. I bet you do.

While I was at it, I also downloaded Sci-Fi Shorts and, upon finishing the sequel, I decided to re-read the first book. My I was for a surprise: there was a number of stories I didn’t recall at all. Most likely because they were not in at the time. Here they are: Kerr Blompty; The Last Man of Earth; The Mind Field; The Knowledge Drain; Flies, Damned Flies, and Stacked Biscuits; Tree Hugger; The Jinx. Now I am in two minds about the extras. I liked most of them*. However, they made the formerly short collection of shorts, well, not-so-short. Hmmm. Hmmm.

Mark Roman’s Sci-Fi Shorts II

  1. Tunnel Vision
  2. Magi-water
  3. Well Read
  4. Space Tourists
  5. Intuition
  6. Rock 100
  7. Libel
  8. Quick Sale
  9. Righter of Wrongs
  10. Spy Human

* In fact, all of them bar the hideously revolting The Knowledge Drain, what with its ugly characters and generally disgusterous content, set in the Foul Universe, etc. etc. It would make me sick forever if I didn’t read it before as a repugnant appendix to The Ultimate Inferior Beings and survived, probably thanks to the mnemic neglect effect. I don’t remember. Read it at your own risk.

Thursday 1 August 2024

Live music and stuff in Las Palmas, July 2024

This is what we’ve seen in July. Sketches and photos by Tamara.

  • 3 July: «Ecos de Canarias y Piazzolla» @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles, Calle Benito Pérez Galdós, 4, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
      Trío Gabriel Rodó featuring Ana Marrero (piano), Liliana Mesa Montané (violin) and Berenice Musa (soprano).

  • 5 July: Sofar concert @ Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Calle de los Balcones, 9
      This is the very first time I went to a Sofar event and loved it, even at the cost of missing the last part of Spain—Germany football game. Featuring Kimera, Shango Dely and Nala Rami; each band played for about 30 minutes.
  • 6 July: «Iron Modvm» @ Auditorio José Antonio Ramos, Parque Doramas
      A show by the Barcelona-based company Iron Skulls, plus some guest breakdance battles.

  • 7 July: «De la ópera al jazz» @ Sala Gabriel Rodó
      The concert by La Banda Sinfónica Municipal de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Conductor: Pedro Vicente Alama Soloist: Aitor Llimerá Galduf (oboe). Called “from opera to jazz”, it’s probably better described by “from Bach to Gershwin”.

  • 10 July: «Orpheus» @ Sala Gabriel Rodó
      A live cinema event where Insectotròpics (Barcelona) reinterpret the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by reviewing the concepts of love, life and death via the virual reality glasses. With guest (on-screen) appearance of Mr. B., Mr. G., Mr. M. and Mr. Z.

  • 11 July: «Los Pfeiffer» @ Sala Gabriel Rodó
      A show by La Troupe Malabó (Castellón) featuring Laura Agustí (violin, soprano), Quique Montoya (clown), Mae Puchalt (violin), Sonia Tabares (viola) and Alberto Zente (cello).

  • 12 July: «R.E.M.» @ Sala Gabriel Rodó
      A show by La Trócola Circ (Alicante).

  • 13 July: «Invitación a la danza» @ Terminal de Contenedores del Muelle de La Luz (Grupo Boluda)

  • 19 July: «Ovvio» @ Auditorio José Antonio Ramos
      I saw this show by Kolektiv Lapso Cirk some five years ago in Santander and thoroughly enjoyed it. But I can’t be in two places at the same time. So Tamara and Timur went to see Ovvio and I went to see Rubén Rodríguez.
  • 19 July: Notas de Verano en Colón: Rubén Rodríguez @ Casa de Colón, Calle Colón, 1
      A concert of the Canarian singer-songwriter Rubén Rodríguez (guitar, vocals) accompanied by Abraham Ramos (timple).

  • 19 July: «Echassiers du Togo» @ Parque Doramas
      A fantastic performance by the Togolese stilt-walkers collective Afuma.

  • 19 July: Sylphes @ Plaza de Santa Ana
      An incredibly beautiful aerial ballet from Italy provided a fitting closure of this year’a TEMUDAS Fest.

Three double bills from 33rd Canary Islands Jazz Festival:

  • 25 July: Perinké Big Band & Adédèji @ Plaza de Santa Ana
      Perinké Big Band led by Ximo Martínez presented their show Fiebre de Mambo feauring vocals of Marieme Herrera and Sofiel del Pino.

      Adédèji is an Afro-beat band from Nigeria featuring Adédèjì Adetayo (guitars, lead vocals), Ebun Arowosegbe (vocals), Mary Sobowale (vocals, violin), Abiodun ‘Wura’ Oke (percussion), Oluwasegun Adebuyi (bass), Ralph Lasisi (tenor sax), Victor Ademofe (trumpet), Samuel Obinna (drums) and Samuel Olawale (keyboards). I should have stayed longer for that one!
  • 26 July: Theo Croker & Ana Popovic @ Plaza de Santa Ana
      Theo Croker (trumpet) accompanied by Idris Frederik (piano, keyboards), Miguel Marcel Russell (drums) and Eric Wheeler (double bass); Ana Popovic (guitar, vocals) with Claudio Giovagnoli (sax), Davide Ghidoni (trumpet), Corey LaDell Burns (bass), Michele Papadia (keyboards) and Jeremy Thomas (drums, vocals).
  • 27 July: Jonathan Kreisberg Quartet & Polo Ortí New Project @ Plaza de Santa Ana
      Jonathan Kreisberg (electric guitar), Marko Churnchetz (piano), Luca Alemanno (double bass) and Colin Stranahan (drums); Polo Ortí (piano, keyboards), Chipi Chacón (trumpet), Samuel Kèri (electric bass) and Naíma Acuña (drums).

And an exhibition:

All the events listed here were free of charge apart from «Invitación a la danza» which cost €15 a ticket.