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- Keeper Shelf: Inda by Sherwood Smith
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- Playing for Ralph Ellison’s Little Man at Chehaw Station
| Keeper Shelf: Inda by Sherwood Smith Posted: 20 Nov 2017 07:04 AM PST Squee from the Keeper Shelf is a feature wherein we share why we love the books we love, specifically the stories which are permanent residents of our Keeper shelves. Despite flaws, despite changes in age and perspective, despite the passage of time, we love particular books beyond reason, and the only thing better than re-reading them is telling other people about them. At length. If you'd like to submit your reasons for loving and keeping a particular book for Squee from the Keeper Shelf, please email Sarah! … OK, Bitches, anyone here like diversity? Kickass female characters? Rich, detailed worldbuilding? Of course you do! And I have got the series for you! Allow me to tell you absolutely everything about it. Buckle up, this is gonna take awhile. I read Inda for the first time in 10th grade, and it totally blew me away. It was different from anything I'd ever read, and it permanently altered the way I read (mostly by making me wayyy pickier). I adore this series, the characters, the world, everything. And no one has ever heard of it! Seriously, there are like three posts about it on Tumblr. So I'm here to unashamedly sell you on these books because I really need more people to read them. Sherwood Smith writes stories in a lot of different worlds but the bulk of her work takes place on a world called Sartorias-deles, a planet with magic that is connected to our world by unpredictable, transitory World Gates. Most of Smith's books are set in the modern era, thousands of years after humans first colonized the planet. Inda takes place 800 years before the present and functions as a biography of a legendary figure known as Elgar the Fox. The books don't read like an actual biography, but they do have a different tone from the modern era books. A crucial part of the history of this world is that thousands of years ago, a group of powerful mage women chose to carry out what amounts to a targeted genocide in an effort to rid the world of violence. They succeeded in eliminating physical rape and pedophilia. It's a dark history, but it does mean that these books have no rape! These women of questionable morals also created universal birth control, leaving us with a world where women have complete control over their bodies and reproductive rights, and everything else aside, that is pretty damn awesome! Our hero is Indevan-Dal Algara-Vayir, the second son of a prince (prince being an aristocratic title that ranks slightly above the other nobles, called Jarls) in the Marloven empire. Marlovens were plains-riding horse warriors who conquered a bunch of castle-dwellers, intermarried with them, and adapted to a sedentary lifestyle. Their culture revolves around war. The eldest sons of the Jarls are sent to the capital to attend the Military Academy while second sons are trained at home to act as their brothers' Shield Arms. While the Jarls patrol their lands or ride to war, the Shield Arms are in charge of the "outer" home defense, in conjunction with the women who are tasked with the "inner" defense and have own Academy in the capital for the future wives of the Jarls and Shield Arms. At the start of Book 1, ten-year-old Inda receives a summons to the Academy. The Royal Shield Arm (the king's younger brother, called the Sierandael) has decided for the first time in history to bring all the second sons to train in the capital. For Inda this is simply an exciting and unexpected opportunity, but behind this decision lies a complex and rather dire tangle of political machinations. Inda goes to the Academy and befriends the king's second son Evred, which doesn't go over well with the Sierandael or Evred's older brother. It quickly becomes apparent that Inda is something of a military prodigy, which should be awesome but because of the aforementioned dire politics, the Sierandael decides he's a threat. A boy dies in an accident, Inda is blamed, and the king arranges to have Inda disappeared to defuse the situation. So a traumatized, eleven-year-old Inda is whisked away in the night, placed on a merchant ship under the name Inda Elgar, and told that he cannot tell anyone who he is or ever come home again. That takes us to about halfway through Book 1. The rest of that book and all of the next generally follow two main narratives. One is Inda adapting to life at sea and using his fighting and command skills to eventually build a pirate fighting fleet. Inda travels the world and runs into a lot of world politics and pisses off the Venn empire because they're secretly allied with the pirates to take control of the oceans and generally becomes very famous as Elgar the Fox. This part is super fun because it's all epic sea battles and swashbuckling adventures and because Inda is short and nondescript and has a tendency to look kind of vague so basically he doesn't look the part of a notorious, kickass pirate-fighter. And his crewmate Fox (my baby) is tall, lean, and sardonic and dresses all in black, and everyone they meet assumes he's Elgar the Fox (the naming confusion is important and complicated). So they use that to their advantage and run a lot of ruses and it's great. The Fox is my favorite book. The other main thread is the politics back home. The Marlovens are descended from the Venn (who are in turn descended from a very lost group of Vikings). The Venn home base is in the frozen north, but they have a powerful navy and an extensive empire, and they're looking to expand south (they need fertile land to support that navy). And what better excuse for some conquering than "we're just bringing the lost children back into the warm embrace of the motherland." This has been a looming threat for centuries, but recently shit has started to get real, and the Marlovens are looking at the very real possibility of an invasion, causing all sorts of interesting and occasionally violent politicking. King's Shield brings these two threads together with the Venn invasion, and Treason's Shore is about the aftermath and global repercussions. OK, now that we've got the basics down, let me explain what makes this series so damn awesome. First of all, the world-building is incredible. Smith has been writing about this world for like 50 years, and it shows. We get the sense of an entire planet full of diverse cultures, each with unique political situations that interconnect at the global scale. These countries didn't just appear one day fully formed; they have grown and changed and influenced each other for thousands of years. Marloven culture especially is just so fascinating to me. It's everything you would expect from a bunch of nomadic horse warriors who just kind of decided to move into someone else's castles one day and "get civilized." Sherwood Smith has a timeline of pretty much everything that has happened in Marloven history. She doesn't dump it all on you in these books, but it still shows in the way characters' actions are constantly underwritten by awareness of historical context. Then there are the characters. Inda is so much fun to follow as a main character. On the one hand, he's this amazing prodigy and command comes so naturally to him, but he also has a strange kind of innocence and obliviousness, and the trauma that sent him to sea sort of froze part of him developmentally. It's a beautiful thing to watch him inexorably bringing people into his orbit without even being aware, like in this scene right after he's led a mutiny against a very nasty pirate, whose crew is primarily comprised of captives pressed into service:
The rest of the characters are just as nuanced and delightful. There's Tau, the impossibly beautiful golden-haired, golden-eyed angel who is incredibly compelling and wonderful despite the fact that he is so beautiful that he literally has GOLD eyes. It should be such a cliché, but Tau is kind, observant, a little prickly and self-mocking, and I promise you will love him. Then there's straight-talking, unfailingly loyal Jeje who has zero patience for kings and their idiotic politics. Quiet, serious Tdor who introduced me to the idea that I might be demisexual long before I knew that was a thing. My beautiful, moody-broody, sarcastic Fox who despite all efforts to the contrary is powerless against the pull of Inda's stubborn, uncompromising desire to be good. Fox was my first bad boy love, a bitter, angry jerk who likes to claim that morality is a lie fabricate to support those in power, so fuck goodness, nothing matters but power and money! Then Inda comes along and just kinda stands aside and assumes Fox will work his shit out even though no one else trusts him. And lo and behold, Fox just keeps quietly opting out of one destructive decision after another until finally this dude comes along and tells him to grow the fuck up, and he does! So yeah, I can't pick a favorite but also Fox is my fave (but also so is Tau…). Seriously, this series ruined me for a lot of books because most characters don't feel nearly as real as these people. So those are the things that make this series so enjoyable, but there are also things that make it really important. Namely that it has all kinds of diversity and representation. For starters, Inda is described as having uniformly brown eyes, skin, and hair, like the majority of people on this world. The Marlovens have a higher than average concentration of blonds due to their distant Viking ancestors, but most people (and therefore most characters) are darker skinned. There are also important characters with disabilities, including two people with dyslexia, and several people lose limbs in battle. A major theme in this series is the aftermath of horrific experiences like battle and torture, and I've always felt the series provides a sensitive and realistic handling of PTSD. No one is ever magically healed, but the love and support of friends and family is incredibly important. One of my favorite parts of the entire series is when Fox rescues someone (omitting name because spoilers) from a super creepy torturer who apparently wore perfume that smelled like pepper and oranges. The entire escape sequence is fantastic, but the most powerful part comes when they're hiding out in the woods, and Fox starts to add pepper to the food he's cooking:
Did I mention I love Fox? This squee could really be all about Fox if I thought anyone would listen to me. Anyway, continuing with the review. Next up, we have women who are powerful and kickass and complex!! Among the sailors, pirates, and privateers, there is no gender divide; men and women both lead and fight and cook and sew and whatever else there is. In contrast, Marloven culture is highly gendered, but women have no less agency or power. Men go to war, women defend. That means women train for war in their own academy with their only special, secret brand of martial arts. The noble women exchange a never-ending stream of coded letters in a kingdom-wide communication network by which they stay informed about history, magic, and the political situation. Marloven women are acutely aware of the dangers intrinsic to a culture that glorifies war, and they spend their lives preparing for the possibility that someone sensible may have to step in to prevent disaster. And finally, there is diversity of sexuality, which is the aspect that made such a big impression on 10th grade me. It's not just that there are homosexual, bisexual, demisexual, and asexual characters in central roles that have nothing to do with their sexuality. It's that sex and sexuality are treated completely differently from how they are in our world. It's not up for debate that sex is an important, healthy part of life. There is no history of trying to police women's sexuality; they don't even have the concept of virginity. Consensual sex of any variety is normal and positive. Having no sex is fine. Monogamy is fine. Polyamory is fine. Characters are in no way defined or labeled by their sexuality. I cannot begin to describe how cool it is to immerse yourself in a world like this one. That being said, these books aren't for everyone. For starters, there are a million characters and So. Many. Names. There's also a lot of vocabulary, both Marloven words and slang terms, some explained and some not. A common thread running through this series is the way certain idioms, gestures, and concepts don't really translate well. I love the discussions of language, the use of slang, the outlandish fantasy names. But it would probably be hell for someone with dyslexia or a bad memory for new words. I also have to include a major trigger warning for child abuse and endangerment. Marloven society is harsh, built on a system of physical punishment that deliberately and inadvertently incites boys to hurt each other. As mentioned above, a boy dies in an accident. Despite all this, these books aren't dark or depressing or excessively violent. They are not like Game of Thrones. No creepy incest or pointless over-the-top cruelty. I'm pretty sensitive to violence, especially bone-breaking, and none of the battle scenes freaked me out (there's a lot of blood but not so much gore or bone stuff). There are some truly heart-wrenching deaths, but the vast majority of the central characters make it through. I believe this series would be categorized as Noblebright fantasy. It is about people who love each other and want to take care of each other and do the right thing. Inda wants to make the world a better place, even though it's not always clear how to accomplish that. I need to just stop now cause every time I try to cut this down, it gets longer instead. I can go on and on and on about everything I love about these books, so I'm cutting myself off. They're amazing, read them! (Please, I need more people to talk about them with.) P.S. If four 700 page books is too daunting for you, there are other options (but please try Inda cause it's the best). Banner of the Damned takes place 400 years after Inda and is narrated in first person by an asexual woman. There's a whole bunch of books in the modern era that are geared towards younger audiences as well as several mostly standalone romances (that will eventually tie into the overall story arc). Most of these are great, but inexplicably largely lacking in the incredible diversity that sets Inda apart. Not everyone is white and straight, but most of the main characters are. (Which is why you should read Inda!!! Sorry, I'll shut up now.) Inda comes from Mikki's Keeper Shelf! She recently graduated with a degree in biology and she has no clue what she wants to do with it. For now, she works from home in California, the better to maximize time spent riding her horse, fostering kittens, and generally hanging out with her cats, dogs, rats, and fish. This has the unfortunate side effect of enabling her continuing membership in the Bad Decisions Book Club. There are so many reasons that Inda has earned a permanent spot on her keeper shelf. It's partly that she happened to discover it in high school, and it had a profound impact on how she views the world, and in particular, how she approaches sexuality. Mikki says it's partly because it offers comfort for any situation; it's usually The Fox that she picks up when it's 3am, and her anxiety says she probably won't be sleeping anytime soon. But mainly it's that Inda and Fox and Tau and everyone else feels so real to her, and sometimes she just needs to spend some time with them. Powered by WPeMatico The post Keeper Shelf: Inda by Sherwood Smith appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Coffee and Comfort at the Cat Cafe Posted: 20 Nov 2017 07:04 AM PST  I recently did a podcast with Sarah and Amanda where I talked about how I was working on blocking an hour out of the middle of my day to devote to reading. For me, maintaining a reading schedule is vital to my self care routine, but getting out of the office for a lunch hour can be challenging and guilt-inducing. Then I learned that a cat café had opened blocks from my office, and everything changed. Rewarding myself for observing my self-care time with some kitty therapy turned out to be a game changer. Three to four days a week I take a break, sometimes for a full hour, sometimes less, and hang out at the Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary Cat Café with the kitties. Reading and hanging out with cats is incredibly restorative for me: I feel relaxed and focused when I leave, physically and mentally calmer. So I thought today I'd bring you with me, virtually.  First of all, I love cats. I love dogs too, but I feel a certain kinship to cats that probably comes from also being persnickety and requiring several naps a day. Our rescue cat, Dewey, doesn't get along with other cats meaning that he's an only child. All of the cats at the Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary Café are adoptable. Safe Haven is a cage-free, no-kill rescue that takes in cats who due to age, physical or psychological challenges, would risk euthanasia in another shelter. If the cats there don't find their forever home, they have a place at the sanctuary for the rest of their lives. So while I can't bring another kitty home, I can socialize with (and hopefully bring comfort) to cats who are waiting to be adopted.  At first I worried I'd be sad hanging around cats who were looking for permanent homes or that the staff would pressure me to adopt. With the exception of an abuse case I discussed with one of the volunteers, I haven't felt sad or depressed at the café at all. The cats are happy, relaxed and clearly content there. There's no Sarah McLachlan playing over the speakers. And the volunteers never once brought up adoption. I'd mentioned that I had a cat at home who needed to be the only feline in the house, and no one batted an eye. Instead they told me they were happy I could come and provide the cats with some socialization.  So what's the café like? There are couches and chairs and tables, places to read and study and work. There are rooms and hiding spots for the cats to retreat to if they don't feel very social. There is, of course, a shelf of books containing romance novels. You can't have a space dedicated to comfort without romance novels.
And of course there are a bunch of cats wandering around doing cat stuff. There's a lot of napping going on. When I first went to the café, I intended to find a space to read quietly, and if a cat wanted to hang out, that was great. I wanted to provide calm energy, but not chase any kitties around making grabby hands. I didn't even think about it, but while I was doing this for the cats, I was also training my mind and body to accept that during this period of the day, I would be calm and relaxed and not distracted by work. I would focus on my book and be peaceful. Pretty much immediately I had kitty friends who wanted to hang out. Mara, a sweet tabby, likes to lie pressed up against my thigh and get belly rubs. I often wind up with one or two cats snuggled up against me on the couch and another one or two sleeping behind my head. They don't always need to be touching me, but they like to be near me and I appreciate that.  That said, all of the cats there seem to be receptive to the occasional head scratch. Some soak it up. I've seen children there who are pretty relentless in their petting, and the cats take it in stride. There are places that they can go (high up or in another room) to get away, but most seem receptive to the attention, some eager to play. It's often easier for me to socialize with animals than people, and the fact that the cats don't demand anything from me (except occasional pets) helps ground me. The volunteers totally respect my space, allowing me to introvert at my leisure. The cat café sells some bottled cold drinks, but welcomes carry-ins. There's a coffee house next door so it's easy to pick up a latte or a cup of tea to relax with. There's no cost for visiting the cats, but they welcome donations. I budget a few dollars for every visit; basically what I would spend on coffee if I was going to read at Starbucks.  Going to the Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary café has helped me solidify my reading habit and given me another incentive to keep it. It's also helped me tremendously in terms of finding a quiet, meditative space where I can focus on restoring my mental energy. My husband has commented that I seem less emotionally drained on the days when I read with the cats than on the days when I don't. If you want to help the Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary, they are set up on Amazon Smile to receive a small portion of certain purchases as donations.  Is there is a place that you like to go specifically to read? What spaces help you find comfort and peace? And hey, do you have a local cat cafe? Here are a few directories that might help you find your own: If you know of one you'd like to recommend, please feel free to mention it in the comments! Powered by WPeMatico The post Coffee and Comfort at the Cat Cafe appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Historical Romances, an Emotional Contemporary, & More Posted: 20 Nov 2017 07:04 AM PST 
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| Playing for Ralph Ellison’s Little Man at Chehaw Station Posted: 20 Nov 2017 07:04 AM PST   Ralph Ellison For the agnostics and atheists among us, there is no divine force dictating our paths. We are only that which we decide, individually and collectively, and can achieve with our own intellect. The human body has natural limitations. And coincidence is merely coincidence. But every so often, I'm confronted with seemingly unconnected factoids that give some credence to cosmic intervention. For instance, the fact that Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994, only three days before the release of Nas' classic debut album, Illmatic, on April 19, 1994. Ellison, of course, is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, a work now heralded as one of the greatest American novels. Drawing from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground both thematically and narratively, Ellison artfully constructs the psychic terror of a black man living in a society of political and social hierarchies that render him, this unnamed narrator/protagonist, invisible, at least insofar as anyone can be bothered to understand his basic humanity. Ellison's time had come: he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the no-longer-young age of eighty-one. But there is some poetry to be found in the passing of one of the most influential black writers in American letters only days before the release of the most influential hip-hop album of all time. Illmatic, like Invisible Man, is a document of black male life, this time from the vantage point of a post-Civil Rights, post-Reaganomics, urban landscape. Nas captures the paranoid sensibility of a black man highly aware of his own mortality, attempting to survive in a world that offers him little more than drugs, police, guns, and prison. Ellison left us with little-to-no indication as to his thoughts about hip-hop, though he shared real estate with the birthplace of that culture. His observations are mostly relegated to aesthetics. In a New Yorker profile that appeared shortly before Ellison's death, David Remnick notes that "…he watches the black kids in Harlem in their baggy hip-hop gear walking down Broadway, and on the same day he sees white suburban kids on television affecting the same style." Remnick points to this as a sign of the integration within American culture that Ellison had anticipated and warmly embraced. Arnold Rampersand, in his 2007 biography, offers this observation of Ellison's on Harlem in the 1980s:
Even with little to go on, I imagine that Ellison had little regard for hip-hop, given his reverence for jazz (of the non-avant garde variety) and dismissal of funk (which he described as "that most odoriferous of musical(?) styles"). He had the profile of a hip-hop hater, but the genre has certainly drawn from the well of his influence. Yasiin Bey (née Mos Def) rapped on his song "Hip-Hop" from the 1999 album Black on Both Sides: "We went from picking cotton/to chain gang line chopping/To be-bopping/To hip-hopping/Blues people got the blue chip stock option/Invisible Man, got the whole world watching." Kendrick Lamar has been compared to Invisible Man's narrator, with hip-hop journalist Andreas Hale writing: "The narrator of Invisible Man spends nearly two decades trying to convince white America that he is to be accepted….Much like the nameless character in Invisible Man, Kendrick feels guilty for investing so much time in becoming immortalized in his music, touring the globe while his friends and family back home were dealing with hard times." What pulls me further toward the belief in a God-like ordering of human timelines, with regards to Ellison's death and the release of Illmatic, is that one of the lines on the album so perfectly embodies an Ellisonian idea. In what is perhaps his best essay, "The Little Man at Chehaw Station," Ellison expounds upon advice given to him by Hazel Harrison, a "highly respected concert pianist and teacher." Ellison was a music major at Tuskegee Institute, specializing in trumpet, and after one decidedly awful recital, he sought solace in Miss Harrison's basement studio. He was seeking a sympathetic pat on the back, but instead received advice that at first confused him. Miss Harrison said to him, "…you must always play your best, even if it's only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there'll always be a little man hidden behind the stove….There'll always be the little man whom you don't expect, and he'll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!" Chehaw Station was a humble train stop near the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Archival images of it suggest that, even in 1931, it wasn't a place where one would want to spend much time. Yet, Miss Harrison created from it a valuable parable to pass along to her pupil. In the essay, Ellison reflects upon the presence of the little man behind the stove, and applies the metaphor to a critique of American literature: "As representative of the American audience writ small, the little man draws upon the uncodified Americanness of his experience—whether of life or of art—as he engages in a silent dialogue with the artist's exposition of forms, offering or rejecting the work of art on the basis of what he feels to be its affirmation or distortion of American experience." Ellison comes to understand, and wants us to understand, that the value of imagining of imagining the little man as part of the audience is this: he "challenges the artist to reach out for new heights of expressiveness." The little man, once we begin to consider his presence, is far more sophisticated than presumed. Though he is attuned to the standards of the broad literary landscape, he has an understanding of American culture that is not represented by them. He is critical of the traditions, precisely because they are unrecognizable in his version of America. In order to create a genuine American artform, Ellison instructs, the little man behind the stove cannot be dismissed based on his humble station, for he is perhaps best suited to apprehend the value of any art that presumes to define the American experience. Though Ellison, throughout many of his other essays, makes the argument that the artistic and the politcal should remain separate, this expansive notion of the literary audience seems to ask us to intertwine the two. The question of audience is, implicitly, one of citizenship—who counts and who does not. Who is afforded the assumption of inherent worth? Who deserves to be spoken to and created for? Nas answers these questions directly and rhythmically on the song "Memory Lane (Sittin in da Park)," where he starts: "I rap for listeners, bluntheads, fly ladies, and prisoners/Henessey-holders and old-school niggas." His Chehaw Station is the Queensbridge Housing Projects, and the little man behind the stove is an assortment of characters populating his everyday life (and is not limited by gender). In reaching for them, Nas created a seminal work of hip-hop that has only grown in stature within a larger musical world in the twenty plus years since its release. One of the many places where Nas differs from Ellison is that he chose to create for the little man behind the stove without wondering whether that little man had a sophisticated appreciation of the American musical world. "Many of us, by the way, read our first Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mann in barbershops, heard our first opera on phonographs," Ellison wrote. For Ellison, the little man is deserving of his consideration because he possesses deep knowledge of the American masters. It is less the little man who warrants his artistic attention and more the little man's unique perspective on that which has filtered into the canon. But to truly consider the little man is to also acknowledge that he has his own intellectual and artistic traditions, and to find value in those as well. This becomes crucial in a time where the backlash to desires for a more inclusive literary landscape leads to reductive arguments about literary merit versus diversity. If "literary merit" has only ever been defined by a singular voice, what merit does it possess? For every gentle push to consider that the definition be altered, that we include artists who challenge that dominant voice, there is the loud and immediate counter-argument that we must hold onto our traditions, thereby shutting those other voices out. I think of recent works from Eve L. Ewing (Electric Arches) and Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart). they place their focus on their own respective Chehaw Stations, and their work becomes wholly American through it. In a delicate, life-affirming experimental mix of poetry and prose, Ewing explores black girlhood in Chicago. Zhang explores first generation Chinese girls in Brooklyn via their bodies' most uncompromisingly human aspects. What allows these authors to sing freely is not an imaginary homogenous American audience ready to listen, but their respect for those Americans who have been told they are not American. As artists, they are redefining the very concept of our country's cultural identity and pushing our literary imaginations past our social reality. "Reject the little man in the name of purity," Ellison admonished, "or as one who aspires beyond his social station or cultural capacity—fine! But it is worth remembering that one of the implicitly creative functions of art in the U.S.A….is the defining and correlating of diverse American experiences by bringing previously unknown patterns, details, and emotions into view along with those that are generally recognized." When we deny the little man behind the stove, we deny ourselves. Mychal Denzel Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, now available in paperback. Powered by WPeMatico The post Playing for Ralph Ellison's Little Man at Chehaw Station appeared first on Guaripete. |
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