Sherlock Holmes is a Queer Black Woman

Claire O'Dell, A Study in Honor

Doctor Janet Watson lost her arm and her dignity fighting the regressivist rebels in the Second Civil War. She came to Washington, D.C., to fight for a reliable cybernetic replacement from a cash-strapped and preternaturally risk-averse Veteran's Administration. But the fight is long and expensive. So while she arm-wrestles the government, she takes a flat-sharing arrangement with the strange and enigmatic Sara Holmes.

Claire O'Dell has written several previous novels and short stories which foreground LGBTQIA+ characters, especially women. Some have won prestigious awards, and been included on year end Best-Of lists. But with this novel, she proposes something apparently new in her C.V.: updating one of genre fiction's most beloved characters in a way that moves her protagonist between eras, genders, and genres, all at once.

This novel breaks neatly into two sections. In the first, O’Dell recreates the early chapters of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, where Watson meets Holmes and unpacks his personality. O’Dell makes appropriate changes, since her viewpoint character is American, Black, a woman, and same-sex attracted. It’s also colored by her near-future dystopian setting, where bigoted rebels in America’s heartland have rebelled violently against the government, and the war drags on interminably.

Besides scene-setting, O’Dell’s purpose in these early chapters is clearly political. Just as the crumbling British Empire provides background noise for Conan Doyle’s novels, the American house divided becomes the constant context for Janet Watson’s unfolding adventures. O’Dell couches this in real-world political events: the optimism Black women like Watson felt after the 2008 presidential election, and the inevitable descent into disappointment in 2016.

The second half is where O’Dell’s story really starts cooking. To mark time while the VA dithers on providing a better cybernetic arm so she can restart her surgical career, Watson takes a job beneath her credentials at a D.C. veterans’ hospital. Working below the level doctors ordinarily see, she uncovers a pattern of soldiers returning from the front plagued with symptoms beyond ordinary PTSD. Watson takes a particular liking to one damaged soldier.

Experienced readers know, the more confidently a genre protagonist likes an incidental character, the more certainly that character will die. The traumatized, over-medicated veteran Watson makes her special project, literally keels over one morning. Strangely, all of the veteran’s lab results, medical screenings, and documentation go missing from the archives. It’s like somebody wants the veterans to go away.

Claire O'Dell

Then a stranger attacks Watson on an empty Georgetown street.

Her curiosity piqued, Sara Holmes brings her considerable influence as a shadowy government agent into Watson’s case. That proves a mixed blessing. Holmes is smart, endearing, and sometimes charismatic; she also proves to be abusive, manipulative, and often dishonest. But this mix of virtues and vices proves her magic qualification to infiltrate a conspiracy so shadowy, even Holmes can only intuit its presence by the damage it causes.

This blend of near-future dystopian science fiction, with one of literature’s most classic detectives, gives a spin on political thrillers appropriate to today’s reading audience. As a Black, queer woman, Watson has a quintessential outsider’s perspective on circumstances of power. As a veteran herself, she knows the divide between those who start wars, and those who fight them. As a doctor, she can diagnose the destruction left behind.

If you’re anything like most people, you clearly see the widening gulf between government and governed, even when the government speaks the language of everyman. This has given rise to multiple conspiracy theories lately, everything from Q-ANON to flat-earthism to, well, whatever came dribbling from the President’s twitter account today. We’re surrounded constantly by aggressive distrust between the people, and those who speak for the people.

Janet Watson understands this distrust. She simultaneously depends on the government, as her employer and the bestower of VA benefits, and sees the ways murky bureaucracy devalues human life. When that bureaucracy turns violently against her, she has only one ally, Holmes—who, despite her vocal protests of loyalty and truth, is herself an admitted government agent. Watson must choose, repeatedly, between the devil she knows and the devil she doesn’t.

Authors wanting to update Holmes and Watson aren’t new. At times, O’Dell’s narrative suggests direct influence from Moffat and Gatiss, among others. Yet despite this common currency, O’Dell’s version remains worth reading, not because we know and love the characters, but because, like all the best literature, it’s ultimately about us. We live in dystopian, post-apocalyptic times. We don’t have cybernetic arms yet. But we need someone like Sara Holmes.

#1 With a Bullet

Depending how you count, either Elvis Presley (below) or the Beatles had the most #1 hits

Earlier this summer, hip-hop artist Lil Nas X broke another record, when his country-rap hybrid “Old Town Road” netted eighteen weeks as number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It couldn’t happen to a better guy, or a better song: though it isn’t something I’d personally seek out, it’s a genuinely good track, with fairly complex hooks and lyrics you could read like literature. Which is saying something in today’s aggressively bland Hot 100.

“Old Town Road” beats the previous record-holders for most weeks at number one, a tie for sixteen weeks between 2017’s “Despacito,” by Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee, and 1995’s “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. “Despacito” is, again, a pretty good song, which I don’t mind when it plays on a shared radio. “One Sweet Day,” however, is so bland and forgettable, I had to Google it to write this essay.

That represents how meaningless the pop charts have become for understanding our culture. More songs stay at number one longer. At this writing, 38 songs have stayed at number one for ten or more weeks, a number likely to change. Of those 38, 24 have been since January 1, 2000, which we can roughly designate the beginning of the download era. If we expand our horizon to January 1, 1990, the number jumps to 36.

This happened, paradoxically (not really), as more artists have more opportunities for wider audience reach. Inexpensive on-demand CD manufacturing in the 1990s, and almost-free digital distribution in the 2000s, have turned more struggling garage artists into professional recording artists than ever before. But during that same time, radio charts have become less likely to roll over. It’s almost like the major labels and the radio industry have a handshake deal to protect major-label prerogative. Almost.

As more artists and studios become capable of producing more music at less cost, the peak of commercial musical accomplishment has incongruously become less diverse. Before 1990, only two songs perched at #1 for ten weeks: Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” in 1977, and Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” in 1981. Let’s be honest, these aren’t good songs. Neither are most others on this list. The longest stints at #1 belong to the blandest songs.

Whenever I talk about music, I inevitably come back to Charles Duhigg. Late in his book, Duhigg talks about how the music industry manipulates listeners’ fondness for tracks which resemble music they already know to create new hits. Read that again: the biggest hits are those which resemble something we already like. We embrace songs which sound familiar, not those which take artistic risks or break new ground. And the business feeds us that repeatedly.

Despite my comments about “Despacito” and “Old Town Road,” the songs which remained atop the Billboard charts longest have preponderantly been the blandest songs ever recorded. Los Del Rio’s “Macarena,” Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” and The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” are songs so pugnaciously banal, one wonders whether they aren’t self-referential performance art. You may broadly remember these songs, especially if they were hits while you were in high school, but you probably don’t like them.

Even the genuine hitmakers on this list aren’t represented by their best songs. Elton John’s “Candle In the Wind 1997,” Santana’s “Smooth,” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” are crinkum-crankum radio fare churned out late in the artists’ career. Though sometimes played on radio for nostalgia, these songs, the biggest hits of their artists’ respective discographies, aren’t very good, especially played against “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Evil Ways,” or “How Will I Know.”

It bears repeating, the artists we consider “classic” didn’t have this kind of chart authority. The Beatles’ longest stay at #1 was nine weeks, for “Hey Jude.” The Rolling Stones’ “Honkey Tonk Women” lasted four weeks at #1; the Supremes’ “Love Child,” only two weeks. These are the biggest hits of pop’s greatest artists. Ernie K-Doe, Paper Lace, and Milli Vanilli all have #1 hits. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival do not.

At a time when American public life is known for strife, controversy, and infighting, “Old Town Road,” though good, is also altogether uncontroversial, a commercial bid for valuable airtime that holds audiences by not challenging them. Which is a pretty good description of the most widely heard Top-40 hits altogether. We might argue that having America’s #1 hit mattered back when Elvis and the Beatles dominated the charts. But those days, sadly, are long gone.

Why Men In Skirts Are Dangerous

Damn right I'm a man in a
skirt! Click to enlarge.

Two years ago today, I returned from my first trip to Kansas City Irish Fest, bearing an armload of CDs and a new kilt. This was my third kilt, but my first patterned one, with a blue tartan inside black pleats. And of course, what do you do when you have a dashing new garment, designed to make a splash? Why, you wear it out in public, of course.

So I did.

Back in college, I wore Utilikilts so often, I became known around campus as “the kilt guy.” But when you get older, the opportunities to do something countercultural, like go out wearing unbifurcated leg garments, become less common. You get used to going along and fitting in, because you have to, because some conformity makes society possible. Grown-ups don’t get to dress funny for laughs.

Thus, when I casually mentioned getting yet another kilt to one of my co-workers, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when he pulled a face like he’d just smelled a turd. “I don’t think I could ever wear one of those,” he said. I asked why not; he just stammered. He literally couldn’t explain why he felt unable to wear clothing that didn’t fit in. So I started attributing.

In my self-superior way, I assumed, for over a year, that my co-worker couldn’t wear something that so closely resembled a “skirt,” because he had internalized society’s gender norms, and he couldn’t bear the thought, even for one moment, of being mistaken for a woman. Especially in construction, a field that prizes highly demonstrative displays of masculinity, I found it easy to attribute my co-worker’s intent to deeply assimilated transphobia.

The longer I lived with this explanation, however, the less satisfying I found it. Yes, this co-worker, and several others, flippantly use homophobic and transphobic language, so that probably contributes. But I’ve come to realize something different also comes into play: people who stand out, often get knocked down. My co-worker has a wife and kids, and cannot afford to draw certain kinds of attention to himself.

In the summer of 2018, in protest of a “no short trousers” rule, a crew of British construction workers arrived to work wearing dresses and skirts. As summers continue getting longer and hotter, under the pressure of global warming, rules that prevent men working outdoors from wearing cooler clothes become more onerous. Rising temperatures may soon make such rules downright dangerous. So the men wore skirts in civil disobedience.

Equally important to wearing skirts, though, the men wore skirts in unison. They all arrived wearing gender-nonconforming clothes on the same day, having coördinated their protest in advance. Thus, men wearing literal dresses, wearing clothes actually designed for women, didn’t become something that undermined their masculinity. It just became a thing they did, together, to make a unified point.

Construction workers in dresses, summer of 2018. Photo via The Times of London.

That’s what my co-worker fears: not being mistaken for a woman, but being mistaken for somebody who rocks the boat. He wants to make a living, have a beer with the fellas, and come home to his family. The controversy which follows looking different, the consequences of being so non-conformist that everybody stares when you walk into the room, impedes my co-worker’s ability to simply be normal and live quietly.

I don’t have a wife and children. And realistically, I probably don’t have a future career in construction; this remains something I do to pay my bills until I can return to my teaching track. So if I look different, it won’t hurt my standings; indeed, if people notice me for simply walking into the room, why, so much the better. If future employers notice you, they remember you.

Of course, it’s easy to say that. Because I’m writing ahead, I don’t know whether I’ll return from this year’s Irish Fest with another new kilt. Probably not, because they’re expensive, and at my age, I have few opportunities to wear them. See, I’ve become just as conformist as my co-worker, even without the obligations of family and career. A working man can afford to look funny in his twenties.

(Edit: ha ha, fooled myself. I couldn't leave without buying a slick two-tone black and grey model. I guess I need to find places a grown man can wear a kilt anymore.)

I’m not special just because I own kilts and my co-worker can’t. I’m not free from the social pressures to look a certain way, and the consequences if I rebel. And, like him, I have to choose carefully which fights I embrace. Because like him, I have work in the morning. So like most blue-collar fellas, I cut my hair, buckle my belt at the waist, and assume my role.

The Problem With Being Right

What makes William Shakespeare so great? I remember asking myself this as an undergraduate. Having double-majored in English and Theatre (do you want fries with that?), I took several courses in Shakespeare, theatre literature, and theatre history, and all repeatedly concurred that William Shakespeare was the greatest English-language playwright ever, if not the greatest of all languages, or even the greatest all-around writer.

But somehow, we never talked about why Shakespeare merits these superlatives.

The closest we ever came to discussing what defined Shakespeare’s supposed preëminence, basically consisted of describing his works. We identified the moral contradictions which brought Macbeth to destruction, or how Hamlet’s lingering indecision reflected a collision between Medieval virtues and Renaissance learning. But this only consisted of identifying Shakespeare’s traits from Shakespeare himself. The inherent reasoning was circular.

And we didn’t even consider Shakespeare’s entire body of work. Throughout undergraduate studies, we repeatedly circled onto the Five Great Tragedies, with occasional forays into comedies like Much Ado About Nothing. I didn’t get a mentored walk-through of non-standard plays like Titus Andronicus until graduate school. When I did, I felt ripped-off in my previous education, because it set everything I knew about Shakespeare in an entirely new context.

(Don’t get me started on anti-Stratfordianism. I had a professor who taught that theory as serious critical scholarship. But what he actually showed us existed on about the same level as Sovereign Citizen politics or the “science” of crystal healings: supposed scholars overhyped minor inconsistencies in the historical record, and insisted that, unless mainstream academia was airtight, every counter-hypothesis deserved equal treatment. I rolled my eyes.)

Only after graduate school did I contemplate how much of what I learned followed this pattern. How much of art, philosophy, and social science actually explained anything, and how much did they just describe? How much history looks inevitable, and free from contingency, because we already know how it ended? And how often do we apply “explanations” to important controversies that simply make moral ambiguities go away, without resolving anything?

Obviously this doesn’t apply to every subject. In science and engineering, for instance, when two different explanations exist for why reality behaves in certain ways, we can conduct experiments or build prototypes to determine which explanation really works. Even when we cannot experiment directly, useful heuristics exist to reconcile gaps. Scientists find evolution more persuasive than seven-day creationism, for instance, because it requires fewer leaps of faith.

But most disciplines, and the most exciting fields within those disciplines, aren’t subject to direct experiment or binary heuristics. For instance, in economics, a field often taught as science, much of the debate we embrace, as between capitalism and socialism, reflects not objective reality, but the values each adherent honors. Is justice more important that freedom from limit? May we prevent some people becoming poor, if it also prevents others becoming rich?

We see this unfold in daily life around us. Employers make important decisions about hiring, investment, and organization based on “theories” that merely describe what’s worked in the past, or what appears to work within thought experiments. Young people looking for work continue flocking to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, not because there’s actual work waiting, but because that’s where everybody goes looking for work. The patterns simply continue.

In politics, Republicans have flourished by making broad appeals to voters’ perceived values, particularly their love of stability and fear of change. Donald Trump’s apparent contradictions go away when you reëvaluate him as simply preserving voters’ illusions about themselves. Democrats, meanwhile, focus on “centrism” and “electability,” phantoms that describe what they think the American median looks like, often without talking to actual Americans.

They all perpetuate the Shakespeare fallacy: we already know Shakespeare is the best, and therefore anybody who challenges Shakespeare’s primacy automatically fails, because Shakespeare is the best. The conclusion is already found in the premise, and can therefore never be disproven. So rather than dispute the premise on its merits, those who’d refute Shakespeare instead cast aspersions on the man himself. Because they, too, accept he’s the best. Whoever he is.

I don’t have a better counter-offer, not yet anyway. At this point, I’ve only identified a problem I haven’t yet resolved. But hopefully, by placing it outside for everyone to see, we can work together to address the ways our cultural myths preserve themselves against scrutiny and challenge. Because, as economics and climate and international tensions threaten to crush ordinary citizens where we stand, somebody should barbecue our sacred cows.

Insult Wars and the End of Politics

Trump's original offending tweets.
Click to enlarge.

If you follow Blue Facebook, or other left-leaning social media, you caught the kerfuffle last week when President Trump quoted conspiracy theorist and radio pundit Wayne Allyn Root. Trump attributed Root as saying “the Jewish people in Israel love [Trump] like he’s the King of Israel… like he is the second coming of God.” The President’s use of two explicitly messianic self-descriptions in quick sequence netted him widespread mockery in the social media universe.

One piece of mockery I shared included a front-page image from the New York Daily News, a tabloid newspaper famous for its pointed front-page illustrations. It rearranged Leonardo’s iconic painting The Last Supper with Trump as Jesus Christ, and filled the Apostles’ seats with noted hangers-on, including Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, and Jared and Ivanka. I thought this image was pointed satire, making literal the message implied by Trump’s self-aggrandizing tweets. I thought it was spot-on.

However, my friend Kristie, whose politics run significantly more conservative than mine, described the image—and not, I noticed, Trump’s tweets—as “beyond disgusting.” Placing anybody in the role intended for Jesus Christ was a bridge too far for her. I thought, not unreasonably, that Trump’s tweets had done exactly that, since they used language copied directly from the Prophets and Gospels to describe the President. But for Kristie, only the image went too far.

This forced me to reconsider. I still believe Trump’s tweets were the inciting action in this rhetorical war, and Kristie closed her eyes to them because her politics coincide with the President. But by extension, didn’t I close my eyes to the crudeness and escalation in the Daily News image in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason? Didn’t I blind myself to the implications, so I could congratulate myself for being right?

Insults and jibes can be powerful rhetorical motivators, helping create both in-group and out-group identities. They can bring populations together in identifying what needs confronted, from opposing ideologies to national enemies. But scholars of classical rhetoric will also tell you that insults can make it impossible to win debates, because once you’ve insulted your opponent, there’s no way those opponents can extricate themselves peacefully without losing face. So apply insults as rhetorical tactics only sparingly.

The responding Daily News cartoon.
Click to enlarge.

Clearly I’d forgotten this precept. The picture ratified what I already think, so I found it easy to disregard how others, who didn’t already agree with me, would receive it. By sharing this image publicly, underneath my own name, I tied my ideological position to that opinion. But Kristie, whose conservative politics derive from her Christian beliefs, saw me appearing to mock Jesus, because she approached the image with a different preceding context than hers.

That’s the problem we face in today’s political environment. Our President sees anybody who disagrees with him as beneath his contempt. Refugee seekers are an “invasion;” cities with majority Black populations are “infested,” MS-13 are “animals.” This language means anybody who’s progressive, non-White, immigrant, or otherwise on his hit-list, cannot resolve the debate peacefully without losing face. We must hope against hope to defeat the entire federal government, which he heads, or accept political humiliation.

Every political discussion today quickly becomes an exchange of insults. It’s no longer progressives versus conservatives, it’s Communists versus Fascists. (And sometimes it is, but not as often as those words get flung about.) We even see this shift of extremes within the President’s personal language: he went from describing Kim Jong-Un as “Little Rocket Man”—and don’t forget, “little” is a racial term—to describing them as being “in love.” There’s no center path.

Don’t misunderstand me. I still think Donald Trump is the principal agitator using rhetorical cherry bombs to worsen political discourse. Given the context, it’s hard not to think that. But when we who disagree with Trump answer his insults by getting into the mud with him, we make it more likely that his supporters will double down on their support. Without our escalation, Trump would, like any schoolyard bully, find himself with few remaining allies.

Bullies, tyrants, and kleptocrats always destroy themselves eventually. From Richard Nixon and Ken Lay to Nicolau Ceausescu and Nicolás Maduro, those who gain power and wealth illegitimately always self-destruct. But engaging in insult wars actually props the bullies up, as we’re seeing with Maduro now. We need to stop matching Trump’s rhetorical awfulness, because it gives his base strength. Instead step back, watch his tantrums quietly, and give him just enough rope to hang himself.