Rabbit, rabbit! I hope everyone who bore with me through the genealogical disclosures of 2019 will have the same patience with my assimilation of the history that the grandmother of my father's father is supposed to have been the first child of American parents born in what was six years off from being the state of California on account of being a department of Mexico at the time. Technically on a wagon train, near the top of the Sierra Nevada. Parents Irish immigrants, like her future husband's family who would move to San Francisco in time to make a killing in dry goods in the gold rush. Her own family had gotten into wheat to the tune of millions. At one point there was a three-thousand-acre ranch. Now it's part of Silicon Valley. America gonif! Half your family is a primer on American colonialism and not two centuries later you're a rootless cosmopolitan. Tell Wittgenstein to call me when the fish people turn up.
2024-06-01
Michael Waters' "A Forgotten Athlete, a Nazi Official, and the Origins of Sex Testing at the Olympics" obviously frames its subject within the historical and present shadows of fascism and transphobia and all the murderous nonsense of pseudo-scientific gender policing, but the fact remains that I never had heard of Zdeněk Koubek and I love knowing that he existed, especially since unlike any number of people who followed his gender trajectory in his era and region, his story did not stop short in World War II. You get used to waiting for the shadow to fall across certain kinds of lives and if Koubek did not have the Olympic career he was poised for after his explosive debut at the 1934 Women's World Games in London, he did have a life as a man, married, with jobs in and around the automotive industry and a connection to sports that lasted till he ordinarily died. I plan to check out the book his story is part of, even if it looks ultimately anger-making: the branching past constricted into the history we inherit, which so easily forgets even what it doesn't take pains to erase. It has reminded me, though, that I meant to look into the rediscovered novels of Claude McKay and the sexological life of Li Shiu Tong. Feel free to chime in; 'tis the season. If history isn't more complicated every time we look at it, we're doing the looking wrong.
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