Writing About Reading
┳ WARNING! ┳ This entry contains references to fictional sex and abuse. — — — Yesterday I reread The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. She, Maya Angelou, and Lionel Shriver are my top three favourite authors of all time. I'd add Alice Walker to list if I wasn't a fake fan who only read bits and pieces of her work. I'll read more from all of them, and plenty of other things while I'm at it!!! Thank God for the Z-Library.
Anyways, The Bluest Eye was just as good as I remembered it. At first I was startled by how quickly I'd reached the halfway point, not realising it was so short. But then I recalled how, more than ten years ago now, I also finished it one afternoon. It was one of a few titles I "stole" from my public high school, alongside Lord of the Flies, Milkweed, and some others.
I called it "stealing" back then because the books were not assigned by a teacher. I felt badass for taking them without permission. Of course, I returned all of them because this badass has limits... Not counting Slaughterhouse V, which I gave to my brother because I knew he liked time travel stories. (Sorry for spoiling Slaughterhouse V.) To my knowledge, he never read it. (Asshole!)
I suppose I did steal-without-returning a beautiful, leather-bound edition of Crime and Punishment, with a built in red ribbon bookmark and a few illustrations, from the children's mental hospital. I didn't read more than a few chapters of that one, so maybe that makes me an asshole, too, lol. In any case, I do all my thievery digitally now. So nobody is deprived! Once again, thank God for the Z-Library.
I hesitate to compare myself and my anime yoomslop to the Great Mama Toni, but I can't help but see myself in her. As much as I enjoyed the novel, my favourite part was actually the afterword, where Morrison speaks candidly about her writing process. By God that is one articulate woman! Because she writes what she called "village" or "peasant" fiction, the dialogue and prose appear before us in a relatively low style. While you're reading, it's not like you're going to forget that the author is a certified genius. They just really smack you in the face, those long, complicated clauses, after a day immersed in ebonics.
What I'm trying to say is that I appreciate her range. Her honesty, too. I read the 2004 edition— apparently, the first digital copy?— and so the afterword addressed her debut novel with thirty years of hindsight. She criticised her work and I understood exactly what she meant. Yes, Mama Toni, I agree that perhaps Pauline and Pecola Breedlove's stories might have been more perfectly told. And yes, I noticed the shocking deftness, subtlety, and knowing with which you approached the male villain instead. It's a shame, but that's just how writing is sometimes. The Bluest Eye is widely beloved regardless... (badum tssh)
I can't wait to be thirty years older, looking at my anime yoomslop, thinking: I see what I was trying to do and I'm glad I tried to do it.
I keep thinking about something I read on one of those websites centered around building a daily writing habit. Unfortunately, there's a dozen of them and I can't remember which. The pitch went something like "quantity begets quality. Don't worry about writing well. Focus on writing fast." It works for everything. Everyone knows that anecdote about the pottery students from Art & Fear, after all.
Ah, I'm rambling. I feel like I'm losing the plot. What did I want to talk about again? Right. I'm the Toni Morrison of my generation, of course of course of course. (Just kidding! That title belongs to my queen CourierNew.)
Sometime last year I watched a phenomenal documentary about her, called The Pieces I Am. As an aspiring author and editor, I felt closer to her than ever. I dunno, when I think about her, I just feel like I can make it. Not necessarily as a ~professional editor,~ just as a human being.
When I was young, I had already read a few books with sex in them. In middle school, Father Flonne lent me his collection of William Gibson books. Neuromancer quite famously opens with that woman from The Killing Floor, Molly, with hard, brown nipples, having an orgasm. (I wonder why I remember that more clearly than anything else in the story, hmmm...)
Even before that, I'd been falling asleep to deplorable fanfiction. I read everything I could find on FF.NET, dark and light, outlandish or not. I read it as earnestly as someone under age twelve, helplessly g**gling, "what is a dildo," and finding zero answers(!) possibly could. But The Bluest Eye was the first real book I read that centered sexual abuse. It was nothing like Gibson's weird porn caricatures. It was a little bit like the evil yaoi, whose frightening premises I recall vividly but are definitely lost to time.
The Bluest Eye was a real book about really terrible, painful, disgusting things. It was printed in real ink on real paper, and I read it in class, at lunch, on the way home, on the living room couch til sundown, without anyone looking twice. It was a rape/abuse/bullying/misery PALOOZA... And they had that shit in my SCHOOL!?!?!? God. It was awesome.
At the time, I was only vaguely aware of my position in society as a Black female. So when I think of my initial affinity for Toni Morrison, it's not as members of the same oppressed classes. It's as two souls with a keen interest in trauma. Even now, I am delighted knowing there are creative people like me out there, writing real books. One time, and this is perhaps the highest compliment I have ever received, my mother told me that the world needs people like me to express the depth of the human experience.
I have a gift. Beyond that— these are my words, now— I have a compulsion. I have to write. My life energy depends on it.
For now I'm enjoying my bloggy and my yoomslop. Initially, I reread The Bluest Eye because, like every good storycrafter, I love references. There is a bit of that book in a lot of my characters. Though I haven't written about her properly yet, you should know my No More Heroes OC is literally named Etheldred Breedlove, LOL. Mama Toni would approve. She named Pecola after the girl from Imitation of Life and made sure the reader knew it, too.
Next I'm going to read Beloved, Sula... probably her whole body of work, actually. I wonder if I should go in order to watch her craft develop in real time. I'm glad to be an adult now, reading with adult awareness and writerly appreciation. I'm glad to live in a world where Black women thrive as much as we suffer. I'm glad I can write whatever I want, whenever I want, and share it with people who appreciate it. On that note, everyone should visit my FFXIV fansite, which has absorbed the bulk of my creative energies lately.
For my four year anniversary with Sans, I am working on a tutorial/guide similar to the one I wrote about making personal websites, but for yumejoshi instead. I whipped up an outline last month and I've got exactly two weeks to see it through. I might not make it in time because I only want to write about Final Fantasy... but ahh, I owe it to myself to try!!!
OH RIGHT! I finally played the new Deltarune chapter with , so I think I'll write about that next time. I always forget I can just blog whenever I feel like it, haha. It's nice to journal again. I had so much fun with the CSS on this entry, too. It felt very effortless this time.
I love my life. There's always something nice to say about it, even if I'm not really doing much. I hope a little bit of the sunshine where I am will reach you all, too.