Month: July 2020

A Couple Conversations I Wish We Could Have Had

Jeff Anderson1 Comment

Zombies are still around the day after, right? Or at least still have their notifications on?

I think for me the reading schedule Daryl set for Bubblegum was just about perfect. But the trade-off I always find myself making in timeline-governed reads like this is that I often have a hard time making time to write more than one post in a week. (Hell, I haven’t even managed to finish all of these that I’ve participated in.) And with the kinds of books we read here, there’s more than one thing in a week worth talking about!

To that end, I wanted to drop a little note here with a couple thoughts I never had the chance (or I guess made the opportunity) to air with the group, in case anybody else has anything to say about them.

I know we were mostly or all struck by the ventriloquizing in “Jonboat Speaks.” Knowing, as we do in retrospect, that it was Belt’s words, I’m even more intrigued by this bit from about page 613:

The only real effort I ever spent on you was on resisting the occasional urge I felt to kick the shit out of you. The urge to kick the shit out of you for being so needy and weak and available to harm. I didn’t quite understand where that urge came from, but I knew it was universal. Not just among the other kids at our school, and not just toward you—I’m not trying to be insulting—but toward every being like you in every kind of social circle in every last species of the animal kingdom. Herd, pack, murder, flock. Universal, this occasional urge.

So Belt understands bullying, although he universalizes it (at least he has Jonboat universalize it), which I know we’d all like to hope is inaccurate. How closely does that urge that he describes here line up with cure overload? It feels like the text is making an inexact association between Belt and cures, but I note that the characteristics the urge is attributed to—”being so needy and weak and available to harm”—don’t include cuteness, which is apparently the key factor in overload.

And speaking of cuteness! It’s canonically registered in juvenile features: the more something resembles certain characteristics of human babies especially (big eyes, high foreheads, short noses, small chins), the cuter it is usually judged to be. Those features are a part of neoteny in humans (Rob, copyediting note for you: the Kindle version, at least, has neotonic and neotony where it should have neotenic and neoteny), which means that compared to other primates, our somatic maturation is slow relative to our sexual maturation. This is not a common word! But it was introduced to us by the axolotl poster in Dr. Kleinstadt’s office. (Axolotls are a standard example of neoteny.) How does that play with the fact that cures actually grow cuter as they age? There’s almost a kind of hyper-neoteny in play there, and I don’t know what it means.

I’m also curious about something that I’m pretty sure would take an actual academic article to work all the way out, but I’d love to hear if anybody has anything to say about it. Here we go: Is there a relationship between Bubblegum and New Sincerity? That’s a contested term, actually (I found a dissertation that gave me a lot to think about); but one very relevant use of it is to describe what we might broadly and therefore imprecisely call the Wallace/Franzen/Eggers nexus of literature. Not comfortable yet concluding whether or how much I think Bubblegum is or isn’t connected to New Sincerity. But what sparked the thought was some feeling of relevance, and the germ of an idea that if the novel is to some extent related but resistant to New Sincerity, Belt’s thought processes—his tortured and spiraling efforts to achieve total transparency—could be dramatizing that affinity and conflict.

And I guess I still owe y’all a post about conceptual art!

My Head Is Filled with Things to Say

Jeff Anderson2 Comments

When I finished Bubblegum the other day, I closed up my Kindle case and just sat there. My husband looked up five or ten minutes later and asked if I was OK, and I told him I didn’t really know. I was still trying to figure out how I felt.

I’m still working through my thoughts and feelings on the book. There’s a lot to process, and I think some parts of it are deliberately in tension with some others; I didn’t expect a neat resolution, so that’s not really a surprise, but it is surprising to me how refractory it is. It leads you in directions and then ditches you just before you arrive at an identifiable place, so you end up with emotional responses cued and no concrete framework to process them in.

Paul said he feels like this book is part one of something bigger, and I feel that feel, bruh. Only to me it’s more like, say, parts one, two, four, seven through nine, and twelve of something bigger. We get a lot of setups that aren’t followed through on, and it’s hard to say why I think that is.

For instance: Gender identity gets activated as a site of at least some salience. Paul caught the references to the Wachowski sisters—and as a matter of fact, in our world Lilly didn’t even come out as trans until 2016, and that was under threat of being outed. In that respect, Bubblegum “does well,” if you see what I mean by such a stupid term. But then the same book uses Fondajane to create a social split and actually names one side of that split “anti-beauty/pro–trans beauty.” So why? Why turn those engines on and then walk away with the keys in the ignition? What’s the function of creating an imaginary world where the Wachowskis are apparently uncontroversially women but also choosing to replicate transphobia—and blame it on the one identified intersex character?

Or here’s a big one: Dr. Kleinstadt the vet. Late in the novel we meet a man who has actually been trained to understand cures. He says cures were only even part of the veterinary-school curriculum for a few years in the 90s, which, fine, right? But that means that this knowledge—that cures are even capable of developing cancer, for one huge obvious thing, but also just the understanding, even if only partial, of what cures are and how they work—is available. It’s out there, it was officially taught in courses regulated by state licensing boards. How is this so irrelevant to the book that it comes up in this one episode and is never referred to? Dr. Kleinstadt even looks Blank in the face, for some period of time, and doesn’t apparently feel the urge to slaughter him. It’s been very strongly implied, I’d say, that Belt is (or believes himself to be) special or maybe even unique in his ability to not want to kill Blank. But lookee here, there are others. Whom we won’t spend any time with or on.

Or: After spending the whole book troubled by how people treat cures, Belt decides to use a drug made from spidge without filling us in on any qualms. Was he that altered by his exposure to A Fistful of Fists? It didn’t seem like it. He was concerned enough about Blank to find Dr. Kleinstadt, which was a hassle.

I guess a big part of why I feel so confounded by the book is that I feel like stuff is missing that I need. Like I’ve just spent two months visiting in a house with a lot of rooms locked, and now I’m supposed to figure out how its owners live in it.

There really is a lot in here that I appreciated, not that you’d know it from the emotional reactions I keep having on these pages. Clyde’s admission that he feels like he and Belt are too old to keep playing the roles of father and son is something I wish I saw more of in stories about father-son relationships. Sandrine’s whip-quick connection of No Please Don’t‘s Bam Naka figurine to Lisette seems like it promises to be worth more thought. Obviously pretty much everything about Annie Magnet is gold (except for her fridging). There’s more.

And obviously I wouldn’t have spent two months reading this and feeling as intensely as it made me if it didn’t connect with me. It’s an uneasy connection, for sure, but the book is powerful and I’m glad I got to read it along with everybody here.