Jul 15, 2022
Erou, Maya Phillips
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Erou, Maya Phillips
For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.
Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.
That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.
Hello I love your web weaving work. Could you please make one about trying to fight and overcome rage and feelings of hopelessness?
Audiobook review: Maya Phillips on her life as a proud “Nerd”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nerd” is a “mildly derogatory” term that emerged in 1950s America to describe someone who’s “socially inept.” Today, the dictionary allows, it can also describe someone who embraces “a highly technical interest.”
While listening to the confident sweep of Maya Phillips’s Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse, I kept returning to the title. Does the mildly derogatory “nerd” still have any meaning, I wondered, in a world where fantasy franchises have consumed the box office and where the fandoms Phillips embraces are avidly explored across the media spectrum? It seems like nerds have become, well, pretty cool.
Then, last night, I had a moment where I realized I was wearing an Ewok onesie, reading The Two Towers, and texting my friends about Star Trek wall calendars while my wife lay beside me reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Nerds.
Not until the very end of Nerd does Phillips explicitly engage with the idea that anyone might question the use of her time to dive deep on anime, comics, and novels about invented worlds. The bulk of Nerd is a series of chapters exploring weighty topics — among them religion, mental health, and race — through the lens of the author’s life. In each, Phillips explains how various imagined universes intersected with her own, providing inspiration and food for thought.
Chapter five, for example, is titled “The Slytherin Firebender of Sunagakure: Self-identification with fandom, racial and national identities in space westerns, and the persistent fantasy of manifest destiny.” It opens during “Christian existence” class in Phillips’s Catholic high school; develops into an examination of the fantasy-universe personality typology trope (Hogwarts houses, Avatar: The Last Airbender nations, Sex and the City characters); considers that phenomenon in the context of real-world signifiers like race and class; rolls back into an evocation of family road trips; and from there launches into a broader consideration of frontiers and identities in vintage westerns, Star Trek, Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars, and Firefly.
The book is so wide-ranging that it could be approached as a geography of contemporary imaginative universes, seen through the author’s individual lens. Unless you’re as well-versed as Phillips is regarding everything from Buffy to Akira, you’re bound to learn something about the fandoms you’re less familiar with. Phillips is generous in providing footholds for people with varying levels of knowledge about her subjects, but Nerd isn’t a 101: readers are expected to know offhand what a mecha is, and what “ship” means as a verb not involving transportation.
Growing up as a gen-X nerd, I scoured my local library shelves for nonfiction books about fantastic universes and found mostly hagiographies of pop filmmakers, dusty histories of Golden Age science fiction, and the occasional behind-the-scenes book. For serious pop culture analysis, I had The Parables of Peanuts and that was about it. From this perspective, it was gratifying to find that Phillips makes the occasional historical reference but isn’t bound by the past. Her emphasis is on the texts she’s encountered, and how they’ve been relevant to her life in real time.
Phillips also takes a dynamic approach to the creator-fan relationship, reflecting the potentially fraught realities of an era when J.K. Rowling can tweet retcons at whim even as her readers share their own takes on the Harry Potter canon. (Phillips and her friends, she writes, won’t entertain the Fantastic Beasts prequels as canon, nor do they credit “the Epilogue That Will Not Be Named.”) Phillips also addresses Rowling’s transphobia, about which Harry Potter’s creator is so resolutely unapologetic that any reference to her formerly ubiquitous fantasy universe is now potentially fraught.
The Nerd author narrates the audiobook herself with a confident, deliberate cadence. It’s gratifying to hear the text in her own voice, but the linear experience of an audiobook can present challenges for listeners who dip in and out. Nerd is a great listen if you have long, uninterrupted stretches of time to spend with it, but in shorter bursts, without the ability to readily flip pages, it can be challenging to hold all the threads of Phillips’s carefully crafted arguments.
Nerd constitutes a testament to the real-world power of imagined universes, and for the importance of remaining critically engaged even while meeting these stories on their own terms. “These worlds only belong to children, we’ve been told for so long, with the understanding that imagination, hope, and dreams may only survive in the innocence of childhood,” Phillips writes, “and yet, if the multiverse can teach us anything, it’s that reality is what we make it. The possibilities are endless.”
It’s a stirring sentiment, and I don’t just say that because I’m wearing a Baby Yoda onesie.
– Jay Gabler
I empathize with Telemachus, the son who yearned for Odysseus’s return but then rejected it when it happened because he couldn’t recognize his own father. His father’s a liar, a deceiver, and was supposed to have been long dead, but, even if none of that were true, in the first book, when asked of his parentage, Telemachus declares, “My mother says indeed I am his. I for my part / Do not know. Nobody really knows his own father.” Paternity tests weren’t around in ancient Greece, of course, but here Telemachus seems to refer to fathers as unknowable in a more general sense.
In my poem “Telemachus,” which comes late in the book, I write, “Fathered by rumor, raised / by ghost, you’ve learned // to love the slimness of the shadow from which you grew.” Telemachus’s moment of incredulity feels real to me. No one wants to hold onto absence when it’s taking the place of someone you love, but that ironic phrasing is important—absence does, in fact, have a place. Or, rather, one can always make a place of absence. It’s malleable, adaptable, and in that is comfort. You can build something new out of absence, build a whole home out of it, learn to love it, because you crafted it into the shape you needed most.
— Maya Phillips, from In Search of a Black Odysseus: My Father’s Journey Home
This is no small thing: to be the wickless candle, borrowed hands of the divine to let there be light even here in the already well-lit rooms.
Maya Phillips, “Trick of Light,” published in The Baffler
sick hungry woman I take and take too much this miss mistress distrust me disgust me wanting woman wanton woman I a mouthing a tonguing an in-cheek kinda sly-slippery-snakebite of a woman bite of a woman who licks—
— Maya Phillips, from “Circe,” Erou