The Stonewall Reader (ed. New York Public Library, 2019)

I'm not really sure why, but one of the common traits that seem to exist among the friends I've made in my adult life is that a majority seem to exist somewhere on the queer spectrum.  Sure, part of that might be because I identify as asexual, which is the eighth letter in the common alphabet soup of inclusive lettering and is frustratingly-often understood as meaning 'ally' or something similarly missing-the-point, but I wasn't even aware of that as a term before 2017 or so.

I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough.  It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really.  And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.

Darn neurodiverse brain.

Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand.  I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such.  I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.

Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities.  You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights.  Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was.  Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.

The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me.  It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history.  The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.

There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices.  This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals...  And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police?  Amazing.

What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath.  It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole.  Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights.  It's honestly infuriating to me.

I'm glad I took the time to read this.  It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught.  Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.

Jólabókaflóð 2018: A is for Ox (Lyn Davies, 2006)

My family started a tradition for ourselves last year, taking inspiration from the Jólabókaflóð tradition in Iceland.  This is a literary tradition, literally the 'Yule Book Flood', in which people are given a book and chocolate on the night before Christmas, with the intention being that you'll curl up with a good book for the evening before the following day's festivities.  In Iceland, this goes so far as to have a catalog of the new books published in the country that year easily available to every household; obviously that would be a little difficult in this country, which is rather larger.  Last year, the book I received was a collection of Jules Verne novels, a rather thick tome that I still haven't read all of (though I rather appreciated that it included Around the World in 80 Days, having recently [at the time] read Philip José Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, which takes Verne's work and attaches a sci-fi conspiracy narrative to it, linking to the author's other 'Wold Newton' novels and stories).

This year's selection for me was rather more readable on the same day, what with only being 118 pages long.  However, it's also something that was completely up my alley, and went on my Amazon wishlist as soon as I found out it existed.  That book is A is for Ox by Lyn Davies.  There's a lot to think over in this one, to say the least.

So, first, the unwrapping experience.  After all, the gift has been here for a few days, wrapped and everything.  Wrapping paper as expected, removed, there's the big giant candy bar because Trader Joe's, and then... more wrapped things.  The book was wrapped in paper by the seller that Mom got it from, and she only opened it far enough to take out the packing slip.  But that's OK.  Feels a little weird through the second layer, like it's a short-edge-bound book or something.  And once I found an edge to start tearing from, that's what I initially thought I had, too.  Except what I thought was the spine had no words, and looked awfully squared-off.  Pulling it free, I discovered... a book in a box.  This is actually rather exciting to me; when I find a book in a box, with very few exceptions, it's a Folio Society edition of something.  These are amazing things to put on any bookshelf; the Folio Society produces high-quality hardcover editions of books with custom cover designs printed right on the bindings, no dust jackets, and boxes to protect them from shelf wear.  Sometimes the boxes themselves have artwork on them, but sometimes, as in this case, they're just plain (but quite sturdy) boxes.  The cover itself, as is perhaps fitting for the book, features a wraparound detail from an inscription in Pompeii (from a rubbing by the author), and the front cover bears an illustration from De Divina Proportione which is repeated on the title page.

The contents of the book come in two flavors.  The first 60 or so pages, and the last four, are a general history of the development of the alphabet.  The first chapter deals with the origins of writing itself in ancient Sumeria, and the influences that Sumerian writing had on that of the Egyptians.  From there, the book moves to looking at the early alphabets used by the Egyptians and Phoenicians, before the third chapter deals with the formation of letters recognizable to modern readers, showing why the Greek alphabet is so different from those of languages derived from Latin (or, as in the case of English, languages that had the Latin alphabet thrust upon them), and ending with the formation of capital letters as can be seen in Roman sites, such as Trajan's Column or the archaeological treasure trove that is Pompeii.  The fourth chapter covers the later development of minuscule, or lower-case letters, from the early Roman cursive scripts to their modern forms.  The fifth chapter is at the very end of the book, and covers modern changes to the way letters are used, both in the rise of what is functionally our modern hieroglyphs as street signs and other symbolic communication (it takes much less time to parse a sign that indicates a slippery road than to read and understand 'Warning: Slippery Roads Ahead' when you're driving at speed), and also in the form of text-message shorthand, using letters and numbers for their name value rather than their pronounciation (such as using 'U' in place of you, or '2day' in place of today).  Each chapter of the book is accompanied by illustrations depicting the writing being discussed, both with the writing isolated, and with its context shown, so that the reader is able to see what each writing system looks like and how it was used.

The second type of content found, and what is perhaps the most fascinating from a visual standpoint, is the middle portion of the book, between chapters 4 and 5.  This section consists of 26 two-page spreads, each of which is devoted to a single letter of the English alphabet.  The top half of the two pages in each case starts with the earliest known ancestor of the letter, which is almost always either Egyptian or Phoenician, though some examples of Semitic scripts appear as well.  Each step of the development of those early letters toward the Roman capitals is shown, followed by the Roman cursive, and the development from those forms to the modern lower-case, always shown through a 15th century printing type. The bottom halves of the pages are a short writeup of the origin of the letter, how it made its way to Rome, and how later scribes created what we now use. This section also includes explanations of a few alphabetic oddities such as the ſ, which is so often misread as being an f in old manuscripts, but is actually another form of lower-case S.

If there's any complaint I can pose regarding this book, it's that it doesn't cover the few letters that have been lost by the English language over the centuries.  In particular, I might have liked to see a few explorations of letters such as Eth (Ðð), Thorn (Þþ), or even the ampersand (🙲&), whose name comes from being considered the last letter of the alphabet until at least the 18th century (W, X, Y, Z, and, per se, and [and, by itself, and]).  I do think the final chapter would need an update in a newer printing (the copyright is from 2006, so predates emoji's emergence in 2009), but its use of common signs such as 'No Smoking' still work very well for illustrating what is being talked about.

Certainly a worthwhile read, and an enjoyable one as well.  Definitely a book that I would recommend for anyone who has any interest in the history of, well... writing.

Summer Reading 2015 (4): The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Zac Bissonnette, 2015)

Summer Reading 2015, #4: ‘A Nonfiction Book’

Thank you, public library new book shelves, for letting something cut in line.  Merlin a little later on, as I’ve allowed The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette to slip in ahead of it.  Two-week checkout limits on new books will do that.

So, to start with, I suppose I should begin with what led me to pick this book up at all.  It’s somewhat eye-catching on the shelf, with the title on the spine matching the coloration of the title on the front.  And let’s face it, a book in 2015 about Beanie Babies is going very, very much against the grain, and seems rather outside of its era.  I mean, Beanie Babies haven’t been relevant since their value tanked fifteen years ago.  But that was enough to get me to pick it up and take a look... and then the jacket flaps went and mentioned the Tulip mania and yup, I’m going to pick it up and take a look, because that makes perfect sense.

For those who weren’t conscious of what was going on at the time, Beanie Babies were... possibly the most bizarre example of a collector’s frenzy over anything in my lifetime.  Let’s face it, when the popular wisdom around a line of exceedingly play-friendly plush toys becomes ‘don’t let children touch them at all’, something has gone horribly wrong.  But that, in and of itself, wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting book.  And this is where Zac Bissonnette hit on a rather more interesting way to handle his book: more than anything, this is a biography of the business life of Ty Warner, from his beginnings as a salesman for Dakin, through the start of his own company (initially specializing in plush cats), all the way up to (and past) his 2014 conviction for tax evasion.

The link to Dakin surprised me somewhat; as a child, I had a downright ridiculous number of Dakin-made Garfield plushes (along with a few Applause-branded ones after the companies merged).  But they weren’t terribly play-friendly, as I recall; the traditional plush as created by Dakin was very, very full of stuffing, so they tended to stick to a specific pose.  That, as noted in this book, was the big trick to Ty Warner’s success: by understuffing the plush as a whole and filling a few strategic spots with PVC pellets to add weight, the Ty plush could be easily posed and played with, and he absolutely used that as a selling point.  Additionally, Warner has hand-designed almost every single plush that his company has ever marketed, and his attention to detail is definitely noticeable.

That said, the rise and fall of Beanie Babies as a valuable commodity was only partially related to the attention to detail.  That aspect of the bubble is explored as well, when the book reaches that point in the timeline, along with an examination of how the mania spread geographically.  The whole book is filled with original research the author did, interviewing as many people involved in the mania as he could; he even reached out to Ty Warner, who declined the offer, but Warner’s personality absolutely shows through, both the positive and negative aspects of it.

It’s absolutely a fascinating read, this.  And let’s face it, speculative manias on the scale of Dutch tulips, Dot-Com stocks, and Beanie Babies are one of those things that one should be aware of, if only to have an idea of how to avoid getting caught up in one.

Next up: Merlin stuff (again, for real this time)