Author: Diane Griffin

Diane is a writer of Fantasy, an intermittent blogger, and a generator of nonsense.

Pete Shelley

He was hardly the first punk rocker to leave us, but he played guitar on the first (and arguably the best) indie punk 7″, Spiral Scratch by The Buzzcocks. I thought he was a wonderful songwriter: there was a time when I thought he was the best songwriter. Another Music in a Different Kitchen was constantly on my turntable when I was 19, and I thought of Pete Shelley as a friend, though he had no idea who I was… but in a way he did. I knew because of his songs that he was on some deep level like me.

When I found out he was queer a couple of years later, I better understood the connection. But that connection was about more than our both being a particular kind of different. He was a romantic and a depressive. He was smart. He made the kind of records I wanted to make.

And today, I was working on a blog post about how we treat celebrities when they die, and at just the moment when I was ready to publish it, I checked Facebook, because that’s what I do. The first thing I saw was that he’d died. Considering the subject of what I’d just been working on, it felt like something I had to write about: both because it seemed relevant and because of how much his music meant to me in a dark period of my life.

There was a time when the only music I wanted to listen to was Spiral Scratch. For days, I played no other music. This was back in the mid-80s, when I lived in a tiny studio apartment in Tucson. I’d listen to it before work. I’d put it on as soon as I got home. When the needle made it to the center on side 2, I would flip it over and play “Boredom” again. I counted 56 times through the whole record. I’ve never done that with any other record. It’s a good thing I lived by myself, then, but then maybe the fact that I was alone was part of the reason why I needed that record so much.

I can’t say that right now, this minute, I miss Pete Shelley. I haven’t listened to the Buzzcocks in a good long time, and I can’t pretend that we have any other connection besides the records. But I am pulling out my copies of Spiral Scratch, Another Music, Singles Going Steady, Love Bites, and A Different Kind of Tension as soon as I get home.

Thanks for the music, Pete. Thanks for the hours when your music sustained me. Thanks for understanding.

BuzzcocksSpiralScratch

Anna Komnene

It’s been pointed out that I haven’t posted much about my research into the Eastern Roman Empire of late. There’s a reason for this: I’ve gotten hung up reading The Alexiad, written by the Roman princess Anna Komnene in the Twelfth Century CE: a history of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, and his reign.

The problem is the relationship I’m having as reader to Anna Komnene as an author. She’s a huge personality, clearly brilliant, and every bit a member of an old-world, long-standing ruling class family. I’ve found the time I’ve spent with her words compelling, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding. I still haven’t finished it, so I won’t go far into the content of the book here. I’ll write about that once I’ve made it to the end. But I can talk to you about my experience of reading the book so far.

I’m intrigued with the contemporary perspective. She talks in the introduction about her uncle, who died of exhaustion: he was so tired he developed a tumor. As a result of such misunderstandings, I was willing to accept her as an at-least-somewhat unreliable narrator due to her medieval worldview. But there are other problems, including chronological errors throughout the book, which I wouldn’t have been aware of if I hadn’t been checking the end notes as I read.

I understand she was working within limitations: she was banished to a convent, and while primary source materials were available to her, it appears that she may not have been able to reconstruct timelines dependably. So much for the chronological inconsistencies.

It also seems to me that she considers the official narrative and contemporary affairs of state as she writes, which I can’t fault her for. It still made me trust her less as an authoritative voice. Causing your reader to be skeptical is a huge challenge to overcome in a work of nonfiction, and I was definitely skeptical about certain things I read.

But the main problem I’ve had is that I’m not sure what to make of Anna Komnene as a person. She was clearly, as I’ve said, brilliant, perceptive, and an engaging writer as well, but she was caught up in the politics of her time, about as high-born a person as there could have been. I admit that I am leery of such people. I have socialist leanings both politically and in how I view class generally. I was prepared to set those prejudices aside, but I was daunted by the way she speaks about her father: how gifted he was, how resourceful, how strong, what a great soldier, how handsome, how pious. It all began to seem like too much. After one such hagiographic passage, I set the book down for a couple of weeks.

To be fair, she doesn’t avoid talking about Alexios’ failures, and she avoids mitigating or excusing them. On reflection, I think she did her best to meet the challenges of writing about her father within the limitations of her circumstances. I still suspect she doesn’t tell the whole truth, and it’s taken me a fair amount of processing to make peace with that.

I also let myself in for a little bit of disappointment by imagining that this book would contain story elements I didn’t end up finding. That’s my shortcoming. I wanted more description, more relationships, a stronger story arc. I think I was looking for a style of writing that didn’t exist in her day. Modern narrative writing is richer in the sorts of details that for the most part Anna either only barely touches on or skips entirely.

The book is mainly accounts of wars and battles Alexios fought, with a paragraph here and there of surprising granular detail. There’s a brief conversation between Anna and her mother. Elsewhere there’s a description of the workings of a particular weapon. It’s for those moments that the book has held my attention most. They’re sparsely strewn throughout the narrative, and when I come upon them, the world of the story becomes much more vivid.

I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there for most of the events The Alexiad covers: not yet born at the beginning, a child in the Imperial creche for much of the time she writes about. She clearly held her father in the highest esteem, and probably heard stories of the events she writes about from him or those around him. It’s unfair of me to judge her for that.

Having understood these things, I am having a much easier time with her book. When I finish, I’ll say more.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m traveling today, and my suspicion is that not too many eyes will fall upon these words, as this is not the sort of day when people surf the web looking at blogs by fledgling writers. I will keep this short, in case these words do reach you somehow. I don’t want to keep you.

I live in Massachusetts, where this whole tradition began, under a dark, bloody cloud. I’ve attended the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth. I know some of the history of King Phillip’s War and its aftermath. So much of the history of this country I call home is built upon horror and hatred, wholesale misery and profound suffering.

For my family, as it likely is for yours, this day has been and continues to be about togetherness and appreciation, and maybe a little bit about overzealous eating. I embrace this tradition, because it’s a good and important thing to do — to honor family and to be thankful.

But we should also remember King Phillip, and the churchgoing Indians who were the first and most devastated victims of the war that bears his name. We should remember a time two hundred years later, when Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé, ran for their lives across the frozen Northwest, starving at the same time that American families were having Thanksgiving feasts, thanking the Lord for the bounty they had, not even knowing the name of King Phillip. If they thought about Chief Joseph at all, those thoughts were not in any way warm with gratitude, or tinged with remorse.

They should have been.

Perhaps we can hold some humility in our hearts along with our joy? Perhaps we can also hold to some vision and some intention towards a better, more inclusive, more compassionate future? We can’t change the past, but what if we do these things?

  • Remember your loved ones, and in that context, remember the value of human life.
  • Share what you have with those around you. This is the spirit of family that I remember as the central tenet of so many Native American tribes.
  • Remember the price that has been paid for this bountiful life. It is the debt that goes with the gratitude of the day.

May you be blessed, and may you recognize your blessings and where they’ve come from.

In that spirit, I thank you for your attention to these words.

Reflecting on “A Fantastic Woman”

Be careful! There may be spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen this movie yet, but want to!

Later this evening, I’ll be leading a discussion after a screening of the Academy Award-Winning film A Fantastic Woman at the Bright Family Screening Room at Emerson College. I’m very excited to do this: I love this film.

I love how it shows Marina’s inner life without being overt. Much of this is shown directly through Daniela Vega’s performance, but there are times when the film uses a kind of emotional impressionism, such as the scene where Marina is walking against the wind and she’s leaning forward, almost parallel to the ground, still pushing forward.

I love the various ways the film represents her isolation: the cold, almost stalkerish way the camera follows her from across the street, or from behind. Even in the wide shots, she’s alone, vulnerable. There’s a time when she has, as nearly as we can tell, been entirely abandoned. It rains, and she has nowhere to take cover, so she keeps walking. What else can she do? Sometimes there’ll come a close-up, and Marina will look directly into the camera, meeting our regard, offering a challenge and a reproach.

A-Fantastic-Woman-Full-Width

And yet, she is saved by her allies several times in this movie. At the end of that walk through the wind and the rain, she comes to a friend’s apartment. They let her in. That resonated strongly with my own experience. A trans person who goes through gender realignment faces significant loss. I know of virtually no one who’s gone through transition who would disagree. But we’re also held together through our support system. Without that refuge, without people in our lives who accept us, we’re in an almost insurmountably difficult position.

A Fantastic Woman shows this to us. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Marina is unflaggingly determined. She despairs. She’s brought low more than once in the course of the film’s story. But she keeps moving and the world moves around her: often in opposition, sometimes in support, though it often feels like the opposing forces are stronger and more prevalent.

Ultimately it’s her own determination that brings her some closure and some peace. It’s her own strength, scant moments here and there of good fortune scattered in with the catastrophe she faces, including a few friends, that carry her through to a new stability.

Some of the movies I’ve seen about trans people seem to be directed mainly at a cis, heteronormative audience: fewer are aimed specifically at trans folk themselves. A Fantastic Woman speaks to all audiences. It universalizes Marina’s experience by placing us at times at that stalkerish distance, and at other times letting us look over her shoulder, and also staring at us levelly, through Marina’s eyes. When she experiences transphobia, no punches are pulled. Some characters in this movie are very up front in their hateful attitudes. Marina is seen as a suspect for no other reason than her presence and the fact of her history. Those who care about her are shown no less honestly.

Marina herself makes foolish choices, though we fully understand and sympathize with her reasons for making them. She is neither a saint nor a warrior. But even so, given the chance, she faces the ugliness of her circumstances and gives back beauty. When we get to the final scene of the film, a long shot that pushes in to a tight close-up, what is revealed through also exposes our own humanity.