Hello Readers,

I don’t know if I’ve found my footing yet in the fight, in this world that is always a fight. I’m calling my electeds more often than not to thank them for doing the right thing. I’ve started running the BlueSky account for Authors Against Books Bans. Who knows how much that will move any needle but it let me use some skills that I’ve developed over the…holy shit I’ve been “microblogging” a long ass time…in ways that can maybe built momentum, leverage the good work of many many other people, and be part of the solution without totally burning myself out. I wonder about writing letters to the editor. I wonder about getting my son Alycester in front of cameras because he is incredibly cute. And I keep looking for things to do at and through the store and my wider bookselling.

So, here are four books and writing about them that aren’t directly connected to everything terrible that is going on and are also absolutely directly connected and relevant to everything terrible that is going on.

Josh

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YESTERDAY

Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T. Fleischmann

As a white, cisgendered, masculine presenting able-bodied dude, our society is organized to ease my movement through the world so much I can almost forget I even have a body. By having the “default” body, my attention is rarely draw to its corporeality. The weight of my body, the weight of a body that everyone must bear, is partially (or almost entirely) born by society. Of course, as I get older my body begins to break away from that default setting. Needing daily heartburn medication and to occasionally where a joint brace aren’t much, but, at just about 45, they are certainly just the beginning. It’s been observed by someone else that the abled and the disabled are not actually distinct populations, but the same people at different times in their lives.

If I have considered all the facts of my body more than the average cis het white dude, it’s because of Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through. By using art as the vector for intellectual embodiment, Fleischmann used terms and structures I could already appreciate to direct me to pathways of investigation I had not considered. They gave me tools to recognize another facet of my privilege and the tools to interrogate that facet.

This is why I think it is especially important for cis people to read books by trans and nonbinary authors; not as a means of “understanding” trans and nonbinary people, but to encounter new-to-you ideas and new-to-you language that open up pathways for a deeper understanding of yourself and your experiences. (There is a reason why we talk about literature in terms of “empathy” rather than “sympathy.”) You can learn a lot about masculinity and femininity from people who had different routes to (or away from) those states than you did. Engaging more fully with the full spectrum of human experience, reflects resources back to help you engage more fully with the full spectrum of yourself.

I saw a version of this idea being kicked around by trans writers on Bluesky a few weeks ago, but didn’t weigh in then, because I didn’t have it fully articulated in my mind. Someone (maybe Casey Plett?) talked about how sad it was when cis people didn’t seem to get something for themselves out of a work by a trans author. This to me, is how (or one way how) you read works written by other identities without appropriating them or colonizing them; by reading them as an unfamiliar way to look inward rather than as a way to understand outward.

Buy Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through from Porter Square Books

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TODAY

Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism & Planetary Citizenship by Christina Jarvis

A few years ago I revisited Breakfast of Champions. It’s always a little nerve-wracking returning to an artist who was a vital part of your own growth because you’re always afraid to discover that, in your youthful inexperience, you’d been fooled. In general, I don’t think that’s a fair approach to either your past self or the artists, but the point remains that Breakfast of Champions held up. It’s cracked sense of humor. It’s satire on American society. It’s weirdness.

Remembering how I read in high school and early into college, I think, objectively, Vonnegut had to be the most influential author of my life at the time, if for no other reason than I read more of his books than any other author. And honestly, as time passes on his career, I feel pretty good about that. I think it would probably be reductive to describe him as American Literature’s Mr. Rogers, but I think there’s something to that and I don’t think either one of them would be upset by the comparison. There’s a way to center human decency in your life so that it radiates outward in potentially radical ways and I think both of them embodied that human decency.

I’ve only just dug into Lucky Mud itself, but I think the fact of it speaks to how broader popular culture understands and misunderstands the relatively few authors that actually enter it. Of course, the guy who wrote Cats Cradle and Galapagos is an environmentalist. Of course, the guy who imagined great expanses of destabilized time can think on the time scales of climate. To assume otherwise is almost akin to being surprised that Sally Rooney, you know from Ireland, is a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. It may also be a sibling to the forces that allow people to walk out of Fight Club thinking it is telling them to start fight clubs.

Not that this audience needs any arguments in defense of humanities education, but books like this also argue for teaching literature. We can’t always talk about things directly. Often we aren’t even aware of what we should be talking about. But art has ways of both bringing to light what lurks in our own idiosyncratic shadows and giving us the language to think about those things no matter how foreign and unfamiliar they may be to us. Often (maybe even especially) when powerful people in the world don’t want us to.

Buy Lucky Mud & Other Foma from Porter Square Books

Buy Lucky Mud & Other Foma from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition by Paul B. Preciado

Not gonna lie. My toddler-dad brain is not up for this. The diction. The vision. The ambition. Me from a few years ago might already be planning an essay that combines Cristina Rivera Garza’s concept of vulnerability vs helplessness and Preciado’s explication of “dysphoria” as the inability to carry the weight into a working definition of community that positions it as actively opposed to capitalism and fascism but, friends, at between 30-60 minutes of reading time a day, much of it pretty wiped out, that type of project is not in the cards for me.

But it might be for you! The ambition on display in this project alone makes it worthy of some attention. And the idea of redeploying an identity under specific attack as a model for revolutionary change is thrilling. Y’all should read and then tell me all about it!

Preorder Dysphoria Mundi from Porter Square Books

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FOREVER

Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953-1989 edited by Stephanie Anderson

I’m thinking a lot (or at least trying to think a lot) about how we’re going to build the better world that follows this without social media, large legacy newspapers, or highly concentrated digital media, because there’s at least some evidence that we, you know, can’t actually build the better world that follows this one, with them. Social media and the internet should have been the perfect tools for organizing, community building, and worldwide solidarity and though there certainly have been and are still moments where we have used the instant interconnectivity of our digital age for those purposes (thinking about #BlackLivesMatter which got close enough to real change to scare the shit out of some white people and the pretty dramatic shifts in bookselling which I don’t think would have happened without that connectivity) it’s clear they’ve been used to much greater effect to spread disinformation and radicalize emotionally vulnerable and culturally isolated young men.

At the moment, I like what’s happening on BlueSky and I’ve got my own little bookish Discord but one of the primary lessons from Twitter is, as long as the platform is privately owned, it could always be bought, changed, or just shut down. But if you own a printer, you own a printer. If you have a book, you have that book and if you have that book, you can find ways for other people to read it too. I mean, we know movements can win and better worlds can be built without the internet, because it’s been done. More than once in fact!

So I’m reading about people who built something meaningful before the internet, sometimes opposed to existing systems of power, sometimes just ignored by those systems of power. I’m reading about people who were particularly excited to be near the beginning of something. Because not only do I have to believe we can build a better world (again) I also have to believe we are near the beginning of that better world. And I’m reading about people who made books, who broke the ground the many of my favorite publishers now cultivate.

I don’t know if I’ll learn anything directly actionable from the book, especially since I’m not about to start a publisher, but sometimes you just need to see what has been built before to know what can be built now.

Order Women in Independent Publishing from Porter Square Books

Order Women in Independent Publishing from Bookshop.org