Shelfies #65: Axel-Nathaniel Rose

In theory, this shelf is my actionable shelf: I research, teach, and write from it. In practice, this is most often the shelf of books that feel like they might be important, even if I’m not quite sure in what way. These four books are connected with threads of navigating academic life, the joy of fandom and its overlap with scholarship, the persevering and ever-evolving presence of the Gothic in pop culture, and how the HIV/AIDS crisis has informed modern queer life. These thoughts are, somewhat bafflingly, all connected in my mind.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

A dear friend told me to read this book in 2021 just as she told me she was leaving the country. She said that I would love it, and that I needed it. Amidst the emotion of “oh dear, we will be in opposite time zones,” I read the blurb and said to myself, “I don’t think I can subject myself to this sort of agony at the moment; perhaps another time.” I finally read it last year, and it is agonising. It is the tale of Machado’s experience of domestic violence, perpetrated by another woman across the early 2010s. What surprised me was that yes, it was agonising, but it was okay; I didn’t get lost in the pain of. Each chapter is told in a different writing style, each titled “The Dream House as Exercise in Point of View”, “as Erotica, “as Bildungsroman”, etc. Most chapters are very brief, but all are enchanting. Machado has written across genres and the nebulous genre/not-genre of “literary fiction”, and the clarity that comes through her fragmenting the story into multiple styles is quite breathtaking. It is gut-wrenching, and it is inspiring, too.

Crush by Richard Siken

Like many queer people my age, I discovered this collection as fragments through fandom on Tumblr. The text as a whole – and the commentary Siken has given on it, sometimes through delightfully acerbic Tweets – is one of the most exquisite things I will ever read. It is so intricate, and its intricacies feel woven into me, now, as I grow with and reread it. Its cover shows a greyscale close-up of a man’s bleeding lip. Blood is woven through this collection, like grief, like devotion, and like the profound abjection of homophobia. Siken has suggested that the thriving of gay vampire media in the current day is in part a reaction to the AIDS crisis; he said, “By 2003, the fear of blood had turned into fetish: vampires. Not death but eternal life.” This book’s significance to 21^st century bookish cultures really can’t be overstated – a large part of my Honours and doctoral dissertations were about just that – but its artistry, and its status as a gift to queer people of the future, can’t be overstated either. 

Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom by Alexandra Edwards

My first encounter with Alexandra Edwards’s work, unbeknownst to me, was watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries as a supplementary resource in a high school English class. Edwards was the “transmedia producer” on the vlog adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and was responsible for bringing the characters’ social media profiles to life and from there interacting with viewers. When coming full circle and teaching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, I was so delighted to realise that this Alexandra Edwards was the same who wrote with such verve and clarity about the not-newness of media fandom. There are many common stories about the “start” of fandom, most commonly Sherlock Holmes or Jane Austen fans of the late 1800s or sci-fi fandom in the 1930s, and Edwards suggests we look anew to the fans of USAmerican women writers from the late Victorian era to the mid-‘40s. I’m not convinced finding a start line is all that important, but I am always excited to read about how people have engaged with the media they love through history, which Edwards narrates delightfully. The smallness of the world, of finding so much meaning in Edwards’s work across decades and careers, makes this book quite precious to me.

The Pocket Instructor: Literature, edited by Diana Fuss and William A. Gleason

I have sometimes wanted a little pocket-sized copy of this book on the 50gsm paper used for Bibles so I could lug it around without it feeling like a process of lugging. A mentor recommended this book to me because I came to his office one day on the verge of frustrated tears over a cohort who seemed to not only not want to be in the classroom but found it offensive that I would expect them to speak. 

This book provides exercises for the Literary Studies classroom, especially in those situations of feeling crushed by the weight of one’s own incompetence. Some of these exercises have surprised me with their efficacy – such as The New Title, in which students are asked to re-name the work they are studying with an explanation as to how it works. Some haven fallen apart despite my assuredness of their success – such as Versification, in which you ask students to analyse quotes from pop culture or music as they might poetry (my inner monologue one 9am Monday class: “What do you mean you can’t hear any consonance in a song from Hamilton‽”).  

Axel-Nathaniel Rose is an author, editor, researcher, and orator, based at UNSW Sydney. His creative works often centre themes of queer history, digital hyperconnectivity, and trans and disabled embodiment, and his critical research centres literary reception and fandom in the digital age. His work, critical and creative, has been published in Transformative Works and Cultures, Axon, Ludic Inquiries Into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education, Unsweetened Literary Journal, and Tharunka. 

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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