Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Which is why I didn't make any post at all last fortnight. So it's been a month since I last updated re music or podcasts. Let's see. Last time, I had just gone through the Country Queer posts on trans artists and butch artists and bookmarked a lot for later.

Most recent discovery/crush: Clyde Petersen, who has a much higher voice range than you might expect given pronouns and general vibe.



Petersen's 2019 album with 'Your Heart Breaks', Drone Butch Blues, is a whole queer concept album, with Petersen's personal history twinned around songs on queer history and drawn from queer writers of the last century or so. Sometimes I can't tell which is which. Without pronouncing on Petersen's personal gender status right now, I can say the album takes an expansive approach and positions him as singer-songwriter in empathy with both gay men and lesbian cultures. I like that, yes I do.

I also succumbed to The Memes and bought Kate Bush's retrospective album 'The Whole Story'. It is certainly... an experience.

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Podcasts and youtube lectures and so on:

Paradise Lost: I have got as far as Adam and Eve's big post-fall marital spat. Anthony Oliveira has a very generous reading of it, whereas I'm rather more inclined toward the traditional 'Milton is an arsehole' reading, but there's something in his argument that, per Paradise Lost, misogyny is a consequence of the Fall.

Starship Iris: I caught up, finished The Museum Heist, which I had for some reason left half finished. It was a bit clunky - I wish more time had been spent on the actual heist, less deus ex machina.

The Spouter Inn: I enjoyed their episode on Toni Morrison's Beloved, and was particularly interested in the ways Suzanne and Chris had to figure out to talk about violence. A word that struck me was - delicate, they called it *delicate*, in order to articulate that sense you get with a master craftsperson like Morrison, where absolutely brutal violence is conveyed incredibly deftly.

Here's a good, short youtube video on late medieval and early modern 'Battle of the Sexes' comic tropes:

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Some links:

Cassie Workman (Junkee), The joy and chaos of my second puberty

Bob Leak (Unicorn Zine), With everyone appreciating online community during lockdown, for me it's always been a lifeline.

Jamie Fisher (New Yorker), The Age of Peak Advice

Emily Mortimer (NYT), How Lolita escaped obscenity laws and cancel culture. I don't agree with Mortimer or Dan Fisher that the difference between now and the 1950s is that Lolita wouldn't find a publisher: for a start, it didn't find a mainstream publisher in the 50s! It was published by an erotica press, the only people who would take it on, which Mortimer includes in her essay! Baffling. But an interesting essay.

Melissa Breyer (LitHub), A brief history of women street photographers

UCL Culture Blog (2013),Bentham present but not voting. The mummified body of Jeremy Bentham does not NORMALLY attend meetings, but it has done so at least once.

Alicia Andrezjewski (LitHub), The semi-hidden history of queer pregnancy in literature. Mostly a review of Detransition, Baby. I was... unsatisifed with this on many levels. In particular, I think it's particularly... gauche? And not very good critical engagement, to complain, as a bi woman who has had a child with a cis man, that Edelman's No Future and similar queer ethics alienate you. Big eyeroll. At least do some reading and find same-sex parents writing and engaging with Edelman and nihilistic queer ehtics, because they are out there. [NB: I am saying that as a bi woman, for those not aware.]

Jeremy Atherton Lin (LitHub), A brief literary history of gay and lesbian bars. Some disappointing gaps; the longer book may be better.

Kimon de Greef (Guernica), Bad Birds in Quarantine. After I so enjoyed Audabon Magazine's piece on parrot piracy, Guernica brings me: FINCH SMUGGLING.

Leigh Patching (guest post at Franki Cookney's The Overthinker's Guide To Sex), I survived purity culture and now I'm Queer AF

Sophie Vivian (Overland blog), On women, dissociation and the experience of trauma. Warning: the current auspol clusterfuck.

Danielle Scrimshaw (Archer Magazine), Heteronormativity and popular history. This piece DOES note that the 'and they were roommates' meme stereotypes historians as homophobic (ironically, homophobically erasing queer historians), but is mostly a complaint about The Straights doing history. It's... good enough... but I want more depth.

Jessica Hines (Ploughshares), The discomfort and difficulty of attention. Posits, not entirely ironically, that love is paying attention.