Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I have said, before today, that if any subcategory-gender speaks to me, it is 'bluestocking'. Not as an uncomplicated aspiration - more as half aspiration, half... limitation. That is, in doing things like polyamory, or for that matter having a sexuality at all, I feel a lot less friction about betraying Current Feminine Standards than I do feel like I am not the sort of girl who does such things. If there's a level at which Current Society norms, expects, sexuality and sexual interest from women* I went from one side of the warm zone (no personal interest, also, surrounded by Christians) to the far other side, using a three year stint of celibacy after a terrible relationship as a sort of underpass.

At any rate, I have had trouble trying to explain to people what I mean by 'bluestocking' as a gender or sub-gender (or supra-gender: the category includes no few people who also can be reasonably described as transmasc, with due historical caution). I have since discovered that what I think of this category as containing is in fact based on 19th century use of 'bluestocking' as an insult, not in the slightest on the eighteenth century Bluestocking Circle, a group of literarily and philosophically minded gentry and noble women who had a lot in common with their contemporaries in Paris who ran 'salons'.

It's not at all surprising that I would have imprinted on a 19th century stereotype, given my childhood reading habits, but there we are.

* Apparently there is: reading Hill's The Sex Myth some years back was like reading a dispatch from an alien planet, except we went to the same university, the same residential college, less than half a decade apart, and what she describes as oppressive normative sexualisation I recognised as what I had categorised as a weird upper crust layer of performativity for deeply peculiar people. Spoiler: I was probably the peculiar people here.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other', which I'm finding very... variable in engagement.
Poetry: Still puttering through Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: Nothing! I finished the Winter issue of Meanjin (2020), haven't picked up the next yet.
Non-Fiction for personal interest: Hooks and Foucault, desultorily.
For Work: Hines' Mock Epic from Pope to Heine. That's it, actively.

Recently Finished:

Swiss Democracy in a Nutshell by Vincent Kucholl


Disgust in Early Modern English Literature by Natalie K. Eschenbaum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am torn between screaming about how much I loved this book, and screaming about so much reliance on Norbert Elias (why, early modernists, why).


Meanjin Winter 2020 by Jonathan Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Pretty good, all up. Gave myself permission to skip things, for once - some fiction, and some of the reviews, mostly. Oh and an essay about the internet. I think about the internet too much already.

Stand-outs were, I think:

Lucy Treloar, Writing the Apocalypse
Alexis Wright, A self-governing literature
Michael Cathart, A tale of four ludicrous deaths
Clare G Coleman, Hidden in Plain Sight
Sarah Sasson, Attachment


If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was on the reading list for some of the high school exams I'm jurying; I don't have to read all the books, but I picked out a few - this one was on my tbr already.

A few things: Baldwin's prose is smooth, and somehow easy to read without being simple. I read this far more quickly than I have almost anything in the past year - certainly faster than any other new fiction. The ending is very effective. Some of the prose is a little purple, in describing the protagonists' love affair, but that works because it's narrated as hindsight - of course hindsight is purple-tinted, in this context.

Could do without the persistent flashes of antisemitism, though.


DNF'd: Sue Monk Kidd, 'The Secret Life of Bees'. Perhaps this one suffered for my picking it up back to back with Baldwin. I'm sorry, white lady writing family saga set in the civil rights era, your drab prose, your melodramatic plot, your poor historicism, oh, and your Relatable White Narrator all show up to your detriment. Ordering this one was a mistake - I ordered, off the list, three that were on my TBR and by African-American authors, and this one on a whim because the cover was pretty and the title seemed whimsically appealing.


Up Next: Well, I'm putting the work on disgust, and the early modern source, aside for a few weeks, so it's back to shock and violence, hooray for me. And I have a few more of the high school list to read: The Color Purple is up first, I think, and then THUG.

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Some miscellaneous links, for your edification:

Rachel Charlene Lewis, interview with Forsyth Harmon (Bitch Media), With “Justine,” Forsyth Harmon Charts Teen Queerness. What's interesting about this is that it's *unspoken* - it's not about a relationship, but a fixation. And yet it hasn't been hounded out of town for being Problematic (on many levels). I ... don't think I want to read the book, but I'm glad it exists.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (Own blog), Sleep around before you marry an argument. This is a good article. I hated teaching thesis-first essay development (essay WRITING, yes. But thesis as the first or second step in the entire process? No, bad.)

Joshua Badge (Archer Magazine), At Home and Incredibly Online. What it says on the tin. Like me, Badge found Pandemic Year odd not because of remote socialising, but because everyone ELSE found remote socialising odd.

Chitra Banjeree Divakaruni (The Indian Express, 2018), From Darkness Into Light. This piece, written for Diwali and around the time that Divakaruni released her novel adapting the Mhabarata from Sita's perspective, has some cool and fascinating things to say about adaptation and identification.

Zaria Gorvett (BBC Future), The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make. On the loss, and revival, of Dhaka Muslin.

Kate Manne (HuffPost, 2016), Entitled Shame, Family Annihilators, and Masculinity. Mann's term 'entitled shame' is a good one and a useful one.

Lucia Tang (Electric Lit), The Pandemic Made Me Feel Removed from My Body—This Book Put Me Back. Clickbait title. Good article about reading Kristin Lavransdatter.

Patricia M. Dwyer (Lit Hub), Living in the in-between spaces of Elizabeth Bishop's life-changing poetry. This is a great intertwining of lit-crit and memoir.

Emily Layden (Lit Hub), The hidden cost of girlhood: what adults get wrong about adolescent disordered eating.

Rachel Vorona Cote, interview with Tracy Clark-Flory (Electric Lit), Tracy Clark-Flory is horny on main.

Emily Temple (The Italian Review), Meditation on Sale. This is a really interesting analysis, from a practicing buddhist, of the failures of pop-mindfulness. I think, even though the mindfulness course I took back in 2012 might grate on Temple as mindfulness explicitly packaged for mental health treatment, Temple's essay gets in part at why I benefited from that, but do not (despite the 'even a little helps!' from my psych) from shorter meditation tracks via app. It’s a tool, not a lifestyle. It helps you to see your mind – and by extension, the world around you – as it is. No more, no less. If you learn to watch your mind, you can see what it does, how it responds to things, the loops it creates. If you watch it enough, eventually you can create a little space where there was none before.

Pamela VanHaitsma (Notches), Queering romantic engagement in the postal age

Hopcraft, Jones and Tam (The Conversation AU), Suez Canal container ship accident is a worst-case scenario for global trade: breakdown from maritime security researchers.

Financial Times, The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez. This seems to be behind paywall, now, but it wasn't before, and it WAS very interesting: it demonstrated a hydrodynamic function called 'the bank effect', where, basically, the bow wave of a vessel turns into water moving extra fast if it can't dissipate sideways. That eventually leads to the force of the bow wave pushing the vessel hard in the opposite direction. The EverGiven lurched too close to one bank, possibly due to wind factors, and the bank effect may have been what pushed her sharply the other way, where she became stuck. The author, whose name I can't recall, works in a lab in belgium that has water tanks and toy boats for simulating just this.

Brian Obiri-Asare (ABC Radio National), I grew up surrounded by white people - and then I moved to Tennant Creek. On the African community in Tennant Creek.