Just Books This Time

[wolffyluna]

Unsafe by Cathy Glass* Another Cathy Glass foster memoir, but a different flavour than usual. The gap between the events and publishing them was a lot smaller, and well. It wasn't "Here's how I helped this kid, while optionally discovering why their family is Like That." It was "and here is why I retired from foster caring." It's a good portrait of why exactly she got disillusioned.

A House By The Sea and The Ones Who Come At Last by PH Lee Two short stories, both responses to Omelas. The first is "what happens when the forsaken children grow up" and the second is "what if refugees came to Omelas." Both very good examples of the genre, and both free.

Still Life With Bones by Alexa Haggerty

This one is about the experiences of an anthropologist exhuming bodies from mass graves from genocides, and thus discussion is going under the cut.

This book is very heavy, but good. It's about what it's like being a trainee anthropologist working on exhumations: a lot of the organisations in Guatemala and Argentina that work to exhume and identify victims get a fair chunk of their funding by training anthropologists from other countries, because if you want to get experience with a lot of bodies quickly... There are also interviews from living victims and activists and other anthropologists. It's a book about death and violence and grief and science, especially in the ways science is ~ideological?

Part of the thesis it builds to is about how... forensic anthropology and exhumation is scientific, yes, but also intensely ritual. Like, the way they set up dig sites is like that for practical reasons: maintaining chain of custody, making sure no bodies get separated from their context, stopping randos from wandering in. But it is also about imposing order of the chaos of unspeakable violence, of going "you may have killed and hid these people, but we're going to find them, WITH SCIENCE!" And that's ritual.

And on a fundamental level 'it is A Grave Wrong for bodies to be dumped in a well, we are going to go to great effort to careful extract them, and then use DNA to identify them so the bodies can be returned to their families" is ritual behaviour.

My brain is connecting it to that one art piece that's on the side of a hospital, of a man holding off the reaper with the rod of Asclepius.

Taking the tools of science for very human, emotional reasons of "fuck you, death, we're going to stop you as long as we can. And if we can't stop you, we're going to bury our dead properly"

---

This book also gave me emotions about a teaching skeleton.

A group of anthropologists was exhuming a mass grave on a military base, with the aim to identify the victims and return the bodies to their families. They found the body of a teenage girl, and a dog on top of her. They asked around, and found there was a teenage girl who went everywhere with her dog, and was last seen at that military base. The anthropologists went to her family, and asked for a DNA sample to confirm her identity and then return her body to them and the family went "we don't have a daughter. We never had a daughter. We won't give you DNA. Goodbye."

The anthropologists had to work what to do with her body. And they decided:

• She loved her dog, they should stay together
• She should be somewhere where she is wanted

So she became a teaching skeleton, along with her dog. She is a valuable member of the staff. And after every time she is used to test the students, her story is told.

WTF Is Tarot by Baraka Wintner

I will preface this by saying that I'm coming at this from a weird angle: 1. I think Tarot works, but for mundane and non-supernatural reasons. 2. I'm refreshing my Tarot knowledge because I like to use it as a randomisation tool to generate ideas for stories.

I'm of two minds about recommending this book. It is a very readable book, and I do like the author's willingness to swear and use anecdote to explain cards instead of dry lists. I think there's also some useful ideas in her specific practice: for example, The Fool card features a picture of someone leaping off a cliff. She uses what card The Fool is leaping towards as a tool for analysis. Is it leaping towards a positive card? Be a holy fool, no thoughts head empty, just go for it! Is it leaping towards a negative card? COMMON SENSE IS COMMON FOR A REASON AND YOU SHOULD USE IT.

But I have two big caveats.

(And this is under a cut just because it is long)

Firstly, there are at least three cards that I noticed that she uses nonstandard meanings for. One is a case of looking at the picture to understand it instead of the usual interpretation (Temperance, and her understanding of it also relies on her, hmm, distinctive spiritual practices), one is a case of afaik trying to avoid the sexist implications in the way she organised the cards (The Moon), and one is taking the reversed meaning as the standard in an exciting and sexist way (The Queen of Swords, and this is coming up later.)

Secondly... look, Tarot is pretty sexist a lot of times, and Wintner is trying, it's just... she's trying in the "well, anyone divine masculine or divine feminine, it doesn't matter what your genitals are!" without really thinking through the fact that feminine here means "passive and emotional" and masculine means "active, organised, rational." There's also this thing where-- I know I'm reading more into the text than she intends to-- she seems kind of offput by the masculine female cards? She really emphasises how masculine and unusual they are, even though technically there's the same number of feminine male cards? She also only ever talks about the flaws of high ~rational intelligence without emotional intelligence to back it up, and never the vice versa.

And this leads to her Queen of Swords rant. I wish I could quote it, but it's one of those things where I'd need to quote the whole thing to get across the sheer passion and vehemence.

The Queen of Swords, in the standard interpretation is about clear headed rational+unemotional judgement, and clear boundaries. It's more likely than other cards to represent a specific person.

The Queen of Swords, according to Wintner: A COLD HEARTED BITCH WHO LASHES OUT BECAUSE SHE HASN'T HEALED. UNLIKE ME, WHO IS YELLING ABOUT AN ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICALLY SMART WOMAN WITH BOUNDARIES

And it's just. She mentions later in the book her difficulties with setting boundaries, it creates this gestalt-- it feels like she's having an argument with, like, an accountant that told her no once? And it's the epitome of a pattern where she's not comfortable with boundaries, she's not comfortable with people who prioritise logic over intuition and emotion, and she's in particular not comfortable with masculine women, and thing which here means 'women who favour rationality over emotion.'

Yeah.

(I am aware I just psychoanalysed an author I never met, but like. You too could psychoanalyse me from what I've written-- feel free to guess which minor arcana suit I see myself most in :P-- and sauce for the goose is sauce for the other goose.

And if Wintner wants to complain, well, I've just done a tarot reading about her energy, and cards are saying she needs more Justice + Emperor + Queen of Swords :P)