Created by lesbian feminists to distribute information and stories suppressed by the mainstream literary industry, Old Wives’ Tales was a rebellion, part of a movement of feminist bookshops that ignited in the Bay Area in 1970 and spread across the country. By 1994, 150 feminist bookstores were open in cities from Anchorage to Miami.
Today, Old Wives’ Tales has been gone from Valencia Street for decades. But Seajay’s store and the broader feminist bookstore movement it belonged to left a lasting impact on women’s literature and pioneered safe spaces for women, especially lesbians, at a time when homophobic and sexist violence was common.
As books about queer people and people of color are banned and lesbian elders fear persecution with an intensity they haven’t felt in decades, the undertold history of these stores has renewed relevance in 2022, and the successes and failures of these scrappy-yet-ambitious shops reveal important lessons about building feminist and queer communities.
The weather turned chilly with a threat of rain as the GPS guided us along winding back roads to Arrowhead. I was struck, as I often am, by the loneliness of so many of our American writers—Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau—each so isolated in their strange digs. “Isolatoes” was how Melville described the diverse crew of the Pequod, “not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.” It’s good to know that Melville, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, had the company of “a black Newfoundland dog, shaggy like himself, good natured and simple.” (“My shaggy ally” was how Dickinson referred to her own Newfie, Carlo.) Readers of Moby-Dick may remember that after Ishmael wakes up in Queequeg’s arms in the Spouter-Inn, and complains of the “unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,” Queequeg “shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water.”
But Melville’s closest companion at Arrowhead, by his own account, was its enormous central chimney, the first thing you see when you step into the cramped entryway. The imposing brick pile, twelve feet square in the cellar, is immortalized in the 1856 story “I and My Chimney.” The narrator’s wife, eager to demolish the chimney in order to have a proper entry hall, hires a shifty architect named Mr. Scribe to justify the renovation. The husband, who, like his beloved chimney, spends his time smoking and settling in place, resists.
Typically, if I said that I’d recently eaten an especially memorable dish, I’d probably mean I’d tried something new at a restaurant. But in Britain 60 years ago, to the mostly (but not entirely) gay male speakers of a dialect called Polari, this phrase had a different, codified, deliciously lurid meaning: Dishes have rims, if you know what I mean.
Polari has a complex hybrid genealogy, as it developed out of terms used in what was known as “Cant” as far back as the 16th century among thieves, evolving into fairground and theater jargon in the 19th century when it was known by its speakers as Palyaree, which then evolved into what we now call Polari. (As a stealth, informal practice, spellings for both the lexicon itself and its vocabulary somewhat varied; the term “Polari” was only codified with that spelling after 1950, following the lexicographer Eric Partridge.) The thread binding these forms is use by outcast or sidelined groups, and Polari as both a jargon and an ethos draws on the languages of the groups that populated these spaces: Romani, Jews, Italians, and the working class.
I’ve lived most of my life looking younger than my age. I love the shock on people’s faces when I tell them how old I am (“No! You can’t be!”), and I’m proud of the many times I’ve stumped the guy at the guess-your-age booth at the Canadian National Exhibition. I credit this, in part, to a secret formula. It’s not quite the fountain of youth, but it’s the greatest anti-aging potion ever discovered: swimming in cold water.
Around the world, woman novelists are refocusing literary narratives about desire, sex, and the body around their own experiences; some of these narratives explore society’s current hang-ups around women’s bodies, some paint a picture of a potential world full of guilt-free pleasure, and some explode the idea of gender determined by the body. Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs (2008), translated into English from the original Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd last year, for example, reflects sexual and societal pressures faced by Japanese women. As she writes from their point of view, Kawakami takes an unsentimental view of women’s bodies, of motherhood, and of the gendered basis of societal expectations.
The lively plot brings in a lot of fine things. It may also be a fair, if disturbing, reflection of a world where nobody need know anything except where and how to find out almost immediately anything they seek to know – a world also where, horribly, it seems you are never alone, never under the radar. The immediacy of information retrieval is good fun here, but also disturbing when you think about it.
“The Greatest Invention”, a new book by Silvia Ferrara of the University of Bologna, restores a sense of wonder at the imaginative leaps required to invent writing. Part of her story (translated by Todd Portnowitz) is familiar: the procession from drawings (a picture of a bull is just that, a bit of art) to visual icons (just a couple of lines to indicate, say, “house”), to symbols. The leap to symbols is crucial: these are distinct from the original referent, allowing them to stand for abstract things, including the many verbs that are hard to picture. Think of the floppy-disk icon meaning “save”, even when no floppy disk is involved.
Although “An Immense World” doesn’t quite plunge readers into other animals’ worlds, it does make a case for how much we humans miss — and misunderstand — when we fail to consider other animals’ worldviews. This, in itself, is a major achievement. Or, as Yong writes, “The task will be hard, as Nagel predicted. But there is value and glory in the striving.”