Strong Verbs Are Just Better

This happens in December.

I wrote a long (LONG) thread for the work twitter last week, about bums and 18th century Chaucer translation. It turned out to also be about restrictive propriety, the validity of crudity in literature, and, possibly, about cunnilingus.

It rang some bells - not exact matches, more resonances, with this essay/book extract by Damon Young for Meanjin, The Vulgar, not the Vulgate. Young explains his avoidance of the word 'sex', the remarkably modern history of the use of that term for sexual intercourse, and his preferred vocabulary. The final paragraph is striking:

In Why the World Does Not Exist, philosopher Markus Gabriel writes that ‘we prematurely create world pictures and in the process forget ourselves’. I write ‘fuck’ instead of ‘sex’ because I am trying not to forget myself.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Finally picked the Shafak 'Three Daughters of Eve' back up. Not much progress on Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows.
Poetry: I noted in the Listening Post last, I'm up to RIGHT before the fall in Paradise Lost.
Lit Mag: A few more bits of Autumn Meanjin read.
Non fiction for personal interest: All on hiatus
For work: Started The Fabliau in English (again), got distracted by overdue library books.

Recently Finished: several rapid dip-ins of overdue books, and one slim but excellent Chaucer study.

Chaucer's Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture by Kathleen Forni

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Extremely useful, ordered a copy for myself.



Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by Peter W Travis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I both think this is a good book and found it boring. Perhaps if I find myself forced to teach the Parson's Tale or something far out of my wheelhouse, I might come back. I can see this being very useful to a non-medievalist faced with teaching some of the CTs. The theoretical frameworks / how to teach "diverse students" bits are already getting rusty.


Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge and Desire in the "Roman de La Rose": Poetry, Knowledge and Desire in the "Roman de La Rose", for which the GR embed code will not play nice. 4 starts, only read intro.



Andreas Capellanus on Love?: Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text by Kathleen Andersen-Wyman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Only read intro: vr useful.



Up Next: Next task is library triage for books out from Bern, which will probably mean a few more quick dips.

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Some links:

Claire Millar (Overland, 2019), Offshore/ashore: Australia's Refugee Writing. I was looking for something to really skewer that thing where liberal-to-leftish Australia has an appetite for refugee writing, but hasn't been able to effect change (same goes for the UK, I was teaching the 2015 volume of Refugee Tales). This isn't particularly skewer-y, but it is a nuanced take.

Ellen Pearson-Haggar (New Statesman), Why bookshop dot org is not the saviour the book world needs. TL;DR it doesn't seem to pull customers from Amazon, but from the high street, while independents get less money per book via bookshop dot org than they would in store.

Dr Finn Mackay (own blog, 2019), Who's afraid of female masuclinity. Mackay has completed a qualitative study of butch identities, and has some really fascinating and nuanced angles on the butch-trans interface. Mackay starts with some moderately well known UK lesbian figures who define butch as 'another kind of womanhood' or even 'another kind of femininity', and notes that this starkly contrasts with what her study found. "For some, the border, or line, between trans and butch was one they drew themselves and in many cases they felt that act of self-definition was the main difference, in a landscape of numerous shared experiences."

Elizabeth Yuko (Architectural Design), From closets to subway tile: how previous epidemics affected home design. Most of this is old news (New York heating, interior domestic tile and lino, half-baths), but tiles in restaurants (the term 'subway tile' was new to me, but appears to refer to a style, not to tiles that are in subways), closets, and 'sleeping porches' were new ones.

Damon Young, extract from On Getting Off (in Meanjin), The vulgar, not the vulgate.

Eudora Welty, extract from One Writer's Beginnings (LitHub), How my parents built a childhood of books.

Emma Rault (Guernica), Mind the Gap: on age-gap lesbian romance. Very, very beautiful.

Ashawnta Jackson (JStor Daily), The forgotten craze of women's long-distance walking.

Carlisle et al, (Journal of Pediatric Nursing), Exploratory Study of cat adoption in families of children with autism. TL;DR, cat good.

Dejan Jotanovic (Bitch Media), Will Feminine Boys Ever Truly Be in Style? I make sure to read Jotanovic's work when I'm in the mood for something really chewy, but this one, while... not wrong... is a bit disappointing. Which is in keeping with the publication, really.

Thomas Dixon (Emotions, History, Culture, Society), What is the History of Anger a History of? This is a chunky open-access academic article, but I think not an inaccessible one. I've been up to my ears in emo-history for half a decade now and I genuinely hadn't stopped to question 'what IS anger'? This despite the fact that in my own emotional mess I often note that the Big Negatives (anger, jealousy, etc) don't seem singular to me at all.