The Position of the Sun

February 1st, Stockholm

I learned recently that the technical definition of the tropics is whether the sun is positioned directly overhead. I was trying to explain to a ten year old Swedish boy how you know you’re in a tropical place, and I was leaning on the weather, the humidity, the wetness, even the creeping, unrelenting vines and trees that creep into windows and break up walls. And then we went to the simple English Wikipedia page and looked it up, and as it turns out, none of those other things matter. It’s all about the sun.

I can’t conceive of the sun being like that, positioned directly overhead, bearing down on the tops of people’s heads with the force of a hammer. I cringe for the delicate skin at the part of my hair that already gets more sun than it should. I imagine that I would need to hide, tuck myself away until the perfectly apportioned 12-hour night was upon us again, and I could safely emerge. The furthest south I've been is Hong Kong, technically tropical, but just barely, and I spent a lot of time in the shade cast by the vertical city.

The sun is low here. It’s one of the things that reminds me, in the midst of normal, daily life, just how far north we really are. The satellite dishes do that, too. They don’t point up at the nice, 45-degree angle here, not like they do in California. No, they point straight out here in Stockholm, facing you head on if you’re looking at them from a rooftop, and when we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, the dishes at the Abisko train station pointed ever-so-slightly down, tracing the curvature of the earth. In December and January, when I went out for a walk at two thirty or three, to catch the last of the daylight, the sun hovered, barely cresting the horizon, bright still, but so weak that I could look right at it, even with my blue eyes. I didn’t have to crane my neck, the way I did as a child, testing out whether adults were right or not about what would happen if I looked into the sun. No, the sun and I were equals, each with our own moderate light, each with our own perfectly appropriate warmth, regarding each other across a field of snow.

You lose things, living like this. You lose the guarantee of warmth, that strangely perceptible movement of molecules, coming from outside of yourself. You are your own powerstation, creating the heat that you need, preserving the heat that you have, taking none of it for granted. There is never quite enough, or there is just enough—I’m never certain which it is.  But the grandiose sun god has no power, not like he does further south. People here don’t have to bow or stoop. The sun sinks below the horizon almost as quickly as it emerged, demanding no homage, slipping away as easily as the sacred in the face of hypothermia. Life continues regardless.

Writing Across Gender Lines

I've been giving a lot of thought to the project of writing from a gender perspective different from one's own lately, for fairly obvious reasons. At The Atlantic, Michele Willens has posted a nice meditation on some of the questions and potential roadblocks that arise with projects like these. 

I chose to write a male main character precisely because of these roadblocks. Had I written a female character instead, the reflexive shift into my own experience in China would have been too hard to avoid, and when I began my novel, that experience was still so close that it would have colored everything, and not in a positive way. By following a young man around, rather than a young woman, I was forced to sit at a slight distance, and it was this distance that allowed me to write fiction, rather than thinly-disguised memoir. 

As time has gone on and Will has survived more drafts than I can possibly count, other benefits to his being male have slowly emerged. For one, the experience of a white male expat in China is still quite different at times than that of a white female expat, and that allowed me to explore certain themes that would have remained at arm's length had I been writing a woman. That said, I am very aware that the majority of the supporting characters are decidedly female, and it would be dishonest of me to say that they weren't easier, in a lot of ways, than Will himself has been.

Some people have suggested to me that this might just be the main character effect, and that it's always trickier to figure that person out compared to those who are not so spotlighted. But I do think that writing a man is harder for me than writing a woman in a similar situation would be, even if it has been better for the project overall. 

That said, Sally Koslow, as quoted by Willens, may well be correct. It may be more difficult for men to effectively cross that gender line. Koslow believes that "By default, women have it easier than men when they attempt to craft characters of the opposite sex, because our whole lives we've been reading vast amounts of literature written by men." But even if we take this as truth, I have to wonder to what extent women writers are influenced by our years of reading women--as written by men. What have we internalized as somehow "necessary" or "true" about literary representations of women that may only be necessary/true because it became conventional through a long line of male authors? (Women's Studies 101, right here.) And assuming that there is at least something that's come out of that long line that's worth challenging, do women writers have a responsibility to represent ourselves in a fictional space that we create and control? 

Lovecraft, Part Two: In Which Things Get Problematic

From "He," a description of New York City:

...the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of the fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.

And now I feel just a touch naive in my earlier assessment of H.P. Lovecraft--this is just one of many passages that I could have cited that dehumanizes those who are Not Quite WASPs. 

I'm not actually surprised by any of this; while I find the interwar period fascinating, if one reads enough written by white men and women in that time period, it takes a lot of work to not notice the blatantly racist comments and assumptions. And I'm not disowning the Lovecraftian aesthetic that is so often reimagined and recycled these days. Whether the problematic elements of Lovecraft seep into these contemporary works is a question worth investigating, but not one that I will handle here. What I'm most disappointed about is that I didn't see this coming--that is, that while my general 21st century cultural knowledge already included quite a bit of Lovecraftian themes and monsters, there wasn't so much as a footnote somewhere in the back of my brain that might have indicated that Cthulhu doesn't come without baggage. Lovecraft seems to have been whitewashed just a bit.

I remember vividly being about eleven years old and hearing Groucho Marx make a racist joke in Duck Soup. Suddenly an artist that I had, until that moment, been enjoying unreservedly, was placed within a socio-cultural milieu that had some pretty big problems. And it's only continued since then--the list of writers and artists whose work I enjoy in spite of taking issue with their politics, for lack of a better term, is long. And I won't lie--as a white woman, encountering racist themes in literature, film, and art infuriates me. But encountering misogynistic themes aches; the creator, to whom I necessarily am allowing pretty unfettered access to my mind and spirit via his work, is judging me. No matter how deep my previous intimacy with the author and/or characters was, it never quite recovers from knowing that, were he to meet me in real life, he'd be judging me by how full my lips might be, because we know that tells you something real and considerable about any woman beyond how much chapstick she might use (thanks, Steinbeck).

All this to say that I don't think we can realistically evaluate someone like Lovecraft while ignoring his bluntly racist tendencies. I'm not saying toss out the baby with the bathwater, but I am saying that when he is, on any level, culturally praised and elevated, omitting a discussion of these other issues not only sidelines a very real part of his work but sidelines a very real chunk of his, and our, readers.

Everyone onto the Google Bus

Over at The London Review of Books, there's another recent Rebecca Solnit piece, and this one is provoking a lot of discussion in my previous home, the San Francisco Bay Area. Titled "Google Invades," Solnit, a San Francisco resident who emphatically does not work in the tech industry, describes the migration that takes place every weekday:

The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

She goes on to describe the unintended side-effects of this type of commuting, not the least being that rents are skyrocketing in a lot of previously working or middle class neighborhoods, making them essentially unaffordable for anyone who is not a part of this particular socioeconomic class. And that's when you can find and respond to a vacancy quickly enough to even be considered as a tenant.

Full disclosure here: while I do not work in tech, I used to live in San Francisco myself back in 2005-2007, and for a year's worth of time, I lived with my computer engineer boyfriend, now husband. And a large part of why we stopped living in the city and moved down to the South Bay was because the commute, which he did using his car, Caltrain, and a shuttle bus, was grueling. Solnit writes that "I overheard someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5 hours from 4.5," and I believe both that the speaker wasn't exaggerating and that this statement was entirely free of sarcasm.

One of the things that we noticed immediately when we moved south--as in, the very day we arrived, while still sitting in the car after pulling up to a grocery store--was that there were kids around again. And not just babes in carriages or ergonomically-designed babyslings in Noe Valley, either, but honest-to-god elementary school students. People like to joke that there are more dogs in San Francisco these days than children, and while this may or may not be true, it captures one of the qualities of the city that is growing more accute: this influx of new tech money is, as Solnit makes painfully clear, starving the city of its celebrated diversity. It's not just that you can stand on a street corner in the Mission or the Marina and watch three versions of the same person walk by (plastic rimmed glasses/skinny jeans/flannel; polo with collar popped/sunglasses/unironic baseball cap); it's that there's an eerie sense that everyone in the neighborhood lives essentially the same life as everyone else. It's the kind of creepy uniformity that used to drive mid-century novels about suburbia. 

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In Which I Make a Confession

Despite being heir culturally to many, many of his concepts of the horror derived other worlds adjacent to our own, until this weekend, I had never actually read anything by H. P. Lovecraft. With great shame I confess that this was true even though I had even bought my husband one of those big Barnes and Noble nicely-bound anthologies that we all know are just a guise to make money off of non-copyrighted works of literature (but buy anyway, because they look kind of nice). At least this meant that when I finally came to my senses and decided to rectify the situation, I had the texts close at hand.

I started with "The Shadow over Innsmouth." From the first paragraph, it was clear that while I had never read this particular story before, I already knew it. Lovecraft has been so absorbed into our collective cultural consciousness that I had already experienced so many of the tropes and plot twists that he employs (not that I'm going to give anything away). I put the book down with great satisfaction, enchanted to be in the hands of this writer.

That said, from what I can tell as I page through the rest of the giant book, Lovecraft is guilty of overuse of his Lovecraftian self, a bit repetitive, and apparently was a really interesting guy (not that that casts shadow on his work in any way). Some of his stories sidle up really close to the too-florid-to-read line. 

But so much in this book I have never read is familiar, including but not limited to:

• Creepy inbred ("degenerate") New England towns
• Monsters with interest in humans ranging from nefarious to indifferent to haphazardly desctructive just for the fun of it, often at the same time
• Narrators who go insane based on what they've seen or experienced (shades of Poe are very evident here)
• Drunk informants who tell the truth that no one believes
• Arkham Asylum/Sanitorium
• The Ancient Ones

What really resonated with me is a concept that the introduction alludes to, the idea that true terror comes from imagining a world in which humans are nothing more than a speck of dust, or a fly to a curious child, simply irrelevant to the larger powers that we so often assume are invested in our lives in a very tangible way. How close this comes to your own (or my own) view is a post for another time, but I can easily imagine how frightening this concept would have been in the '10s, '20s, and '30s, in light of the incredible scientific advancement that was taking place. For the first time, this horrific idea was all the more horrific because there was evidence that it might be true. And we all know that the best horror works with what we are all actually afraid of in the realm of fiction, thus making it just safe enough to finally consider.

So a belated salute to Lovecraft. And I hear that Del Toro might be looking into adapting the novella Mountains of Madness for the screen. Seems an appropriate combination to me.