Strong Verbs Are Just Better

In a new peak of middle-classness for me, I have taken out a subscription to the TLS. This feels especially egregious, because unlike Meanjin, it isn't a subscription justified by homesickness, nor backed by a desire to Support Australian Literature. I just kept hitting paywalls on articles I wanted to read - book reviews and reflection pieces on interesting topics, or related to work but not quite work, and so on.

Very often these articles are by Irina Dumitrescu. My first hard copy issue (last weekend's, because international mail) arrived and sure enough, there's an Irina article I'm interested in.

Irina herself, meanwhile, seems to be having a bit of a crisis of direction. These two tweets, one as part of a longer thread, generated some interesting responses:

There are so many ways but right now what riles me up is the way the academic industry alienates people from the things they loved and found meaning in.

Ideas. Teaching. Books. Writing. Discovery.

How many literature scholars do you know who rarely read for pleasure anymore?

— Irina Dumitrescu (@irinibus) March 19, 2021

#AcademicTwitter, have you found the intellectual life you were looking for in academia? And if not, where have you found it (if at all)?

— Irina Dumitrescu (@irinibus) March 19, 2021

I don't really know; I am both stifled and frustrated. I envy Irina her public-facing writing (and desire to do some myself, but am stalled, not for lack of starting places but for lack of someone to talk me through the process, and also, I am doing so many things). I feel more stifled, I think, not for lack of 'intellectual community' but for lack of clear connection between ideas and, as they say, praxis. I know a lot of paradigm-shaking things; I can think and write about The State of Everything; but between being abroad, language barriers, academic stultification, what have you, it's difficult to make the connections I'd need to do anything actually PRACTICAL.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Girl, Woman, Other, on which I am stalled again.
Poetry: Paradise Lost, but I haven't touched it for a while.
Lit Mag: Still very slowly plodding through Meanjin Winter 2020. Autumn 2021 is due out soon!
Non-fiction for interest: Both hooks and Foucault; more progress on the hooks.
For work: 'Disgust in Early Modern English Literature', and 'Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine'. Elin Diamon's Unmaking Mimesis.

Recently Finished: Or, in one case, given up on.

The Fabliau in English by John Hines

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Largely boring, which is why it took me so long to wade through. As ever, I find Hines' approach too rigid, too reliant on a definition of fabliau that is strictly based on the small French corpus - and yet at the same time I would rather read the English fabliau through scholarship on the French ones, as Hines is pretty stuffy. HOWEVER. Source studies are solid, and this time I found the last chapter very useful and generative.

Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage by Mary Devlin




I decline to rate this book. It is all three of racist, boring, and startlingly lacking in obscene humour.


Bodyservant by Kit Fryatt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I liked the first quarter of this book a lot, and then my appreciation tapered off (my appreciation for an Arthurian reference is generous, but can be over-taxed). I found the much longer poems in the latter third were Not My Jam.

( Poetry and ethics and sexual assault )

Online Fiction:

Elizabeth Flux (Meanjin Winter 2020), Call him Al. Another Disappointed Woman story. Neat conceit, didn't grab me.

Up Next: Well, my book piles are overflowing again. Next week I'm writing a paper on an 18th century text, so the EM books get priority. And, for another thing, I need to start on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 'The Forest of Enchantments'.

---

Some links: I didn't post last weekend so they're a bit old now.

Tony Dunell (Atlas Obscura), Gouwe Aqueduct. Why build a raising bridge when you can build a boat-carrying aqueduct over the highway?

Guy Rundle (Meanjin Winter 2020), Callback setup in the funny factory. Rundle misses the days of skit TV, as opposed to the era of standup. Something he doesn't comment on is that there are now a lot more women stand-ups than there were women on skit TV (although he does tell a funny story about the frustration/humiliation of a woman standup turned skit comedian forced to dress as a rotisserie chicken).

Jennifer Mills (Meanjin Winter 2020), Walking Maps of Bruny Island: a nice slow peaceful read.

Linton Besser (Meanjin Winter 2020), Whither Democracy?: a depressing read.

Michael Cathart (Meanjin Winter 2020), A tale of four ludicrous deaths: much more cheerful. Dying explorers! Womanising colonial bourgoise! Snakes! Also, quite interesting from my point of view, some exerpts from a letter written to the ill-fated Burke (of Burke and Wills) by a female friend of his.

McKenzie Wark (The White Review), Girls Like Us. This is, broadly speaking, *about* trans memoir and about trans women's pain as marketable commodity, but it is also incredibly, strikingly well written as creative non-fiction.

Liv Lansdale, interview with Garth Greenwell (Guernica), Incredibly Vulnerable Beings. "I think it’s an assumption on my part about human beings: that we don’t know ourselves, that we are much more mysteries to ourselves than we are clear, and that someone who feels they are not a mystery to themselves is deluded. It always seems to me that there’s a great deal of ourselves we don’t know, and that we don’t want to know."

Bethane Patrick, interview with Melissa Faliveno (Electric Lit), The bad things we have to do to be good girls.

Katherine Angel, exerpt from 'Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again' (Granta), On vulnerability. "There may, however, be some wishful thinking at work in insisting that we have a sexuality that can be discovered separately from interaction with others. The difficulty with the notion of what one ‘really really’ wants – finding that out, and bringing it, as if it were an object, to sex." This essay talks about sexual curiosity and uncertainty in ways that I have rarely seen directed at (presumed) straight women outside of a. bdsm (and not even always then) or b. evangelical marriage guides. It was something I needed to read.

Lucy Fleming, review of Anne Louise Avery's Reynard the Fox (TLS), Up to his old tricks.

Hattie Porter (Recovery in the Bin), The politics of an unstable sense of self: on being a slightly mad queer. ("Is it that I don’t know who I am, or is it that I’m not who they want me to be?")