Hogwarts Professor

J. K. Rowling made a much longer than usual tweet on Monday in which she responded to a seemingly serious claim that “Gender identity is real, layered, and deserves a more thoughtful approach” than the un-nuanced assertion that “transgender women” are mentally ill men.

Here is the original claim with Rowling’s three paragraph response immediately after:

The first response to this was a question about Rowling being tested for chromosomes, the twixter assuming that Rowling had been asserting that the question “What is a woman?” can only be answered in terms of XX or XY chromosomes. Rowling replied with her answer to the question “What is a woman?”  (specifically, “How can I know I am a woman without a chromosome test?”) and a chart outlining the various genetic possibilities for men and women. [Read more…]

Robert Coover, one of a legion of postmodern writers with whose works a well-educated reader is supposed to be conversant, died on 5 October 2024 of undisclosed causes. I’m guessing at age 92 it matters less than it might otherwise for us to know.

The Washington Post’s obituary, ‘Robert Coover, Master of Postmodern Fiction, Dead at 92,’ was well done and the Wikipedia page devoted to him and his work is a helpful introduction and overview.

Reading the frequently anthologized Coover short story ‘The Babysitter‘ this afternoon, I thought of what Robert Frost is supposed to have said about writing in free verse: “I would rather play tennis with the net down.” Postmodern fiction, as ridiculously self-conscious as it can be about the rules of writing (and how all of them must be broken or challenged more or less simultaneously), too often makes me think that these are verbal artists who want only to play in the net, with the net, without rackets or tennis balls.

As noted in The Post obituary, however: “When Coover’s stories don’t work, which is about half the time … they’re dreadful — arid experiments that are the equivalent of lighting the wrong end of a filtered cigarette,” New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote in 2018. “But when they work,” he went on to say, “oh my.”

Indeed. When I’d finished ‘The Babysitter’ today, I realized the story — if you want to call its paragraph story facets that — would haunt me forever. It is the ‘break all the rules, the fourth and fifth walls coming down’ kind of writing you find in George Saunders’ ‘The Semplica-Girls Diaries‘ and Nabokov’s ‘The Vane Sisters‘ that years later roll into one’s thinking, unsolicited and seemingly without connection,  while standing in a queue at the beach or when taking a break from routine but hot and sweaty work at a job. Appearances which add the dimension to perspective and awareness that are the singular contribution of this writing. The “oh my” of Garner’s review.

I recommend those three stories, one, two, or the set, for anyone wanting to remember the remarkable Coover at his passing or for Rowling Readers, Potter Pundits, and Serious Strikers, who wish to remind themselves of the too-oft forgot truism that Mrs Murray is a postmodern writer writing on postmodern themes for a postmodern audience.

Foster that “incredulity toward the metanarrative”! “Innovate, innovate, innovate!” Etc.