Friday Links: Queer Reading List From a Straight Guy Edition

“…say it’s too hard to be out there in life…ain’t no excuse…You gotta get out there an do stuff, try to make shit work!” – James Hannaham, ‘Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta’

Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!


It’s a great life we lead, the kind of life where we get to read books. Damn I read a couple of good ones this week. You ever feel so lucky to be alive at the same time as these people who see the world in this incredible way and then translate what’s in their heads to literature?

No matter how lucky we are to read books, this’ll be the last week I read more than one book for a while. Summer is here, and the pace was getting to me anyway. Gonna make like Kawhi and slow the pace, read deeper.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately:

Mrs. Dalloway might’ve said she was going to get the flowers herself, but Mrs. Dalloway’s gender matched the sex she was assigned at birth. At least one thing came easily to her. I gotta say, dudes—these two books are flat-out incredible. Breathtakingly good. Impressive achievements and yet readable, that elusive balance. I’m talking, of course, about What Pecan Light by Han VanderHart and Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham.

What Pecan Light by Han VanderHart and Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham

What Pecan Light by Han VanderHart: this is the book of white southern poetry I have been waiting for. It probes the atrocities and failures of our forebears further, and for my money a touch more effectively, than Kory Wells’s Sugar Fix (but these two would make an excellent pairing). Yet this book is not rooted in anger and retribution. The poems situate themselves in crop-yielding and battlefield-fence-dotted nature, taking the capital-L Landscape for what it is, what it used to be, and what it used to be before that.

How gross is chicken farming? Pretty gross. Asking for a Confederate pardon is grosser. How beautiful are the pecan trees? Very beautiful. Eating biscuits with honey with your family is beautiful, too. “I said warm not war. / I said surrender.” the poet says, mere pages before ending the book with barbecue—serving collards and ribs, aka the best barbecue food (Han I’ll bring baked mac and cheese). All books, like the best Fast and Furious movies, should end with a barbecue.

Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta by James Hannaham: Lord in heaven, where to start with this amazing book? Let’s do a text example, so you can get an idea what reading’s like. The book is third-person limited which is often interrupted by first-person narration written in dialect. The sense is, you have a narrator (which kind of functions as the camera, if this were a film) and then the main character’s internal commentary (kind of a fourth wall-breaking aside, if you’re a smarmy TV producer, you pitch this as “Afro-Latina Fleabag,” maybe).

“In 1993, Carlotta’s cousin Kafele had shot some old lady whole sold little bottles of Thunderbird to the skels of Bed-Stuy and put her to sleep for a month. Carlotta was in attendance, showing off her talent for bad timing.”

“But she hadn’t finished her face—she only had the blue pool-cue chalk (smuggled in from the juvie wing) on her left eyelid This gon look bad. It do look bad!…no way would they spring a freakazoid with just one blue eyelid. The minute she saw her chance, she leaned over and smudged her blinker with the one chalky finger she still had…”

“Carlotta nodded Not countin the year in jail fore the sentencing, but I ain’t gonna split no hairs, and said, ‘That is correct’ How I coulda did the whole twenty-one an then some is I’m a fuckin bruja.”

“I done my damn time an then some. Paid my debt or whatever. Society sure want a whole lotta cash back from folks that ain’t got no money—the fuck’s that about?”

From here, we get 10 episodes of Carlotta adjusting to her freedom, struggling with parole stips (it does not help that she can’t be around alcohol and this Fourth of July weekend happens to include three different parties being thrown at her family home), and reflecting on her torturous time in prison.

By the way, you should know all the CWs that come with someone reflecting on their time in a US “correctional facility,” and if you don’t? Maybe read this book, then this one.

I will say this book is more “memories of violence” than “scenes of violence.” It is, after all, stream of consciousness.

That’s a term I think sometimes gets a bum rap. Partially because it’s hard to fully inhabit the consciousness of someone multiple generations ago, partially because it’s real easy to type-puke a bunch of half-formed nonsense that doesn’t connect and call it “stream of consciousness.” Here, the narrative is more effective than Charizard’s Blast Burn—we are on Carlotta’s side simply by being readers, and we can see exactly how she reaches the conclusions she does and why she acts the way she does. Zooming out, of course, we see a person making bad decision after bad decision thanks to a brain broken by a life of torture (being trans in New York in the 70s and 80s, having a child for a few months before going to prison/solitary for 22 years has the exact opposite effect on your brain as playing Wordle every morning). I say bad decision after bad decision, but I do not think this novel is a tragedy. There are maybe some ambiguities with the last chapter, but I choose to read that Carlotta is going to be alright, in fact, she’s going to be more than alright. She’s shed her old identity and her deadname, call her Diana Ross because she’s coming out.

Carlotta joins Kris and Harry Stables in my personal pantheon of “purely cool narrators I’ll always cheer for even when they’re being stupid.” This book RULES.

LINKS!

A little different this week, as it’s less links per se and more recommendations. You want something to listen to though? I’m trying to get my kid into Queen, they play “Don’t Stop Me Now” in one of the Sonic movies.

  • Check Out Han VanderHart’s Whole Deal: when we started The Line Break, the only poetry podcast I knew about was Commonplace. I sort of wondered if podcasts were a medium most poets would consider debasing somehow. Could poetry exist in internet culture? Obviously, yes. Poets have do a million other things just to risk one person eventually reading their work, possibly accidentally. Han does those things—co-running a press, hosting a podcast, and running a journal. The journal’s stated values include being “…a place for moist poems, for gendered and queer language, for language play…” Han is sort of like a busier version of me, except instead of getting cheeseburger spittle everywhere while excitedly asking “what do you know about Bill Wennington,” they’re always saying insightful things about gender and sexuality.

  • A Few Elders: a lot of people seem to forget that LGBTQIA+ people existed long before Obergefell (here’s a Cracked article I wrote proving that fact, here’s a Cracked interview I didn’t conduct proving it). Here’s an embarrassing story: in my younger years, I’d frequently forget that Frank O’Hara, unofficial Secretary of the New York School, was gay. Then a couple years ago, I re-read Lunch Poems, and determined that if Frank O’Hara were alive right now, he’d be running Britney Spears stan accounts across all the socials. Scanning my shelf, I see Hart Crane, someone I haven’t read since undergrad. James Baldwin—I’ve only read The Fire Next Time, maybe check out Go Tell It On The Mountain before this blog comes out next Friday. I see Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I should revisit. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter is a translation of Sappho. Point is, you can reach across history to read queer writers, they existed and published before Instragram was even a thing.

  • Queer Re-Imaginings of Stories: this is an excuse to talk about two of my favorite books, books I talk about all the time: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and R E D by Chase Berggrun. Autobiography, of course, asks “what is Greek hero Herakles only murdered the red-wingéd monster Geryon’s heart?” R E D, on the other hand, is an erasure of Dracula—a novel riddled with the monstrous sexism of Victorian England turned into a poetic mediation on gender dysphoria. Re-imaginings, of course, don’t have to be poems. Here’s a Goodreads list of LGBT retellings of classic tales. I’ve heard good things about Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Mellisa Bashardoust.

  • Some Novels and Lyric Essays: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar for a depiction of my favorite kind of love story—the kind where two friends realize they’re in love with each other. Orlando Virginia Woolf for some Modernist gender-bending. I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself by Mac Crane probably isn’t a handbook for great parenting while gay, but I read it as a relatively new parent and it made me want to hug my kid. Blackspace: On The Poetics of an Afrofuture by Anaïs Duplan for a look at queer futures. Eros The Bittersweet by Anne Carson because any time Anne Carson writes about love you are going to have your mind turned out by its possibilities (good and bad). Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield for a depiction of a professional class lesbian relationship, and what happens when one of you gets taken by the sea.

  • Some Presses With Exceptional and Exceptionally Queer Back Catalogues: Haymarket Books. Coffee House Press. Metonymy Press. Tor Nightfire. RedBone Press. Five’s enough to get you started. You can lose whole days browsing the back catalogs of five presses.

What’re you still doing here? It’s summer! Mal had Juneteenth off and we went to the beach. The kid’s really taking to the water. We’ve been going to baseball games too—get out there and have a summer!

File:Capocotta gay beach.jpg

If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Anytime those jagoff customers get you down, ask yourself what would Carlotta do? The answer is probably not something you should do, but she’d know her worth and never lose confidence in herself—those are two things you should do.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris

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