Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I stayed up far too late the other night bookmarking artists mentioned in the CountryQueer article Your Guide to The Butches of Queer Country (and the earlier piece Trans Country Artists You Need To Know, which I started some time ago and got hung up on Namoli Brennet).

First one I abitrarily pulled up on Spotify was Catherine the Great, not least because her hair looks like mine did when it was short-but-below-ears, and I am fascinated by the idea that that hairstyle could work with a soft butch aesthetic. Anyway, I love her already! She has a song called 'Eat the rich for Christmas' that assures you it's 'better for the planet than veganism'!

I bought her album 'Jigsaw Puzzles and Pink Wine', and am loving it. She doesn't seem to have any pro music videos, so I recommend this one, NOT on the album



Side note: I spend enough time overlapping with trans twitter that it's slightly jarring to see the phrase "girls like us" NOT used to describe being trans femme, but I'm pretty sure that's not the intent here. Strongly suspect the song itself is transferrable, but not Catherine the Great's self-articulation, AFAIK.

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Podcasts and spoken media

Fiction:

As per last week's reading post, Lightspeed Magazine Podcast's recording of The mathematics of fairyland by Phoebe Barton. I'm a little so-so on the story but the recording is great.

Unwell s3 launched. I'm weirdly leery of starting - the emotional commitment of a New Series! But I bit the bullet and loved S3E01. I now know how my favourite ghost died!

I was caught up on Starship Iris, although I think another episode came out. I was unsure about how it would fare in the second season, and I'm not yet sure if the plot will be as tight, but the characters remain compelling.

Non-fiction:

The Spouter Inn: I enjoyed the special episode with Irina Dumitrescu on food writing; and the episode on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was interesting.

I listened to Natasha Simonova's lecture Seven Habits of Highly Effective Bluestockings, which was a keynote for a conference on 'habit' that's now on YouTube. I don't know much about the 18th c Bluestockings per se - my sense of identification with bluestocking-ness is anchored in the 19thc, in the term's use as a catch-all dismissal for women's intellectual pursuits. But clearly I SHOULD know more!

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Some links:

Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler), Death in the Mango Orchard: a book review, of sorts, of Sonia Faliero's The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, a true crime investigatory about a double murder in rural Uttar Pradesh. Also serves as a thoughtful overview of the stakes in this particular crime. I would, however, have liked a little more interrogation of what Faliero's racial background (not Indian, afaik, and neither Hindu nor Muslim) did to shape her reception in the village / the end result of her book.

Alice Robinson (Meanjin blog), What I'm reading. Interesting reflections on children's lit here.

Jamie Hood (The New Inquiry), Fucking Like A Housewife. I talked about this one in the preamble to the reading post last week.

Gernsbacher, M. A., & Yergeau, M. (2019). Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 7(1), 102-118.

Carol Lefevre (Meanjin Winter 2020), Silence and Light. one of the things my Meanjin subscription has brought into my life that I would never have sought out is art criticsm, and this is one of the pieces I am grateful for.

Toby Fitch (Meanjin Winter 2020), Endlings: a sort of essay-poem on extinctions.

Alexis Wright (Meanjin Winter 2020), A Self-Governing Literature. Gosh everything Alexis Wright writes is so good. This piece is a lightly edited version of an address given at a conference on literature of 'the Global South', which explains why mid-essay she turns to interrogating that concept.

Randa Jarrar (Bitch Media 2018), Neither Slave Nor Pharoah: finding the divine in BDSM. This one is as much about race, religion and heritage as it is about BDSM and gender. Do recommend.

Jillian L. Martinez (US Figure Skating News), Eliot Halverson challenges gender norms. Halverson, now a coach, used to compete (in men's competions, I think?), retired due to homophobic pressure, and is now a coach and choreographer.

Ruth Madievsky (Guernica), Girls on the Playground. This is a pretty intense retrospective on the author's experience of child sexual assault.

Chelsea Voulgares (Electric Lit), Can a revenge movie succeed without violence? I'm reading a fair bit about rape revenge movies right now, but this piece-a review of 'Promising Young Woman' is what actually articulated for me why people watch the genre (which I do not wish to watch myself).