Strong Verbs Are Just Better

The most notable thing in my reading life this past fortnight has been the Radio Canada audio-livre of Anne... la maison au pignons verts, which is free to listen online and downloadable to the 'OHDio' app (which I recommend - pause and restart glitches a bit online). I recall the last few times I started the Anne series from the beginning (I often pick up from Anne of the Island, and in 2019 joined Mum and Ms-then-10 partway through Anne of Avonlea) I have started getting a little choked over either the death of Matthew or Anne's decision to give up her scholarship, but apparently, give it to me in French and in audiolivre format and I sob from the 'my girl, of whom I'm so proud' conversation with Matthew right through Anne giving up college and on to the end of the book.

Mercury doesn't care at all for my feelings, and so please imagine me sobbing to French narration while sitting on the floor wiggling a chasey toy.

Something that struck me on this read through is that 'English' as a subject of study seems to be firmly established in both secondary and tertiary education. Anne's scholarship is won in 'English and English Literature' (the French narration had English OR English literature, but I'm fairly sure they would have been one class), and there are plenty of references to literary classics (some fairly recent - The Lady of Shallot, f'r ex, is only about fifty years older than the setting, although sixty-something older than the book itself) 'prescribed' by the English curriculum. The narration frequently mentions that it's a NEW curriculum, and I kind of wonder if there might have been a big change in high school education around the 1890s in PEI. All I could find was that public education (including, I think, local tertiary education - unsure about the Catholic university in Charlottetown though) had been free since the 1850s.

'Queens' of Anne's day (and LMM's) is Prince of Wales College, which in the 80s was combined with the 'Normal School' teacher training instittue, so as to offer both teaching certificates and something like the first year of a bachelor's degree - apparently modelled on the system of colleges in Quebec, where a collège diploma is required for entry into university. Fascinating.

At any rate, English was definitely a subject of study at Queens (and presumably at Prince of Wales in LMM's day), and seems to have been at Redmond. I've read a fair bit about the formation of the modern 'English department' in the UK (or specifically England - there's always a caveat about Edinburgh having had a chair of Rhetoric and Literature since 1790). The story as I knew it is that UCL was the first to offer English, although it turns out that rumours of its English degrees were greatly overstated, per UCL themselves - they had a Professor of English, but BAs at the time were a broad sweep liberal arts program with various compulsory subjects, and English was only an elective until 1858, and thereafter only assessed at the interim exams; the first graduates 'in English' graduated in 1903 after a curriculum shake-up.

Dalhousie, LMM's alma mater, have rather less historical detail available on their site, but they credit the foundation of the department to the 1865 establishment of a chair in Rhetoric. While they don't state when the first undergrads in English graduated (perhaps because I think they run a more American-like system, where majors are a thing but not the be all and end all of your degree?), they state their first MAs graduated in 1903, the same year UCL's first BAs graduated (and offering postgrad courses were part of the same shakeup at UCL). I would hazard, then, that LMM probably did not 'study literature' as per her wikipedia page, and Anne neither - likely they took a broad-swathe Liberal Arts program, which would be why there's very little mention of subject choice anywhere in the books. Although it IS notable that there's no complaining about geometry in Anne of the Island (whereas at UCL mathematics was required), so perhaps Dalhousie was even more flexible.

I would really like to know when 'English' became a subject for secondary study, though, and how its subject goals varied across the Anglosphere. ... Fortunately I have some schemes in mind that may lead to finding this out.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter: picked this up from hiatus, again, and am enjoying it. Particularly liked 'Erl King'. Cleanness, Garth Greenwell: picked this up from hiatus, too, and while the next chapter isn't as compelling as either of the first two, I continue to enjoy his style and perspective.
Poetry: still nothing
Lit Mag: am making small progress with my backlog of the TLS, but not Meanjin or Archer.
Non-fiction for personal interest: I got back to 'The Queer Child', although really by now I should consider it a work interest, and skim the bits I can't use accordingly.
For work: Finished the intro to 'Indecent Exposure', and am looking forward to the chapter on the Reeve's Tale.

Recently Finished:

The Longest Memory by Fred D'Aguiar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was one of the assigned readings for high school exams that I was examining, and it was REALLY well chosen for that purpose. The students struggled massively with the narrator's status as a slave who had moralised against challenging his lot (in a way that, lbr, *even granted* the way the narrative unfolds, I would be leery of from a white author - but unlike many of the other short readable slavery-era novels I've encountered in this context, it's not by a white author), either because they didn't pick up the current of self-recrimination as he recounts his former beliefs or because they couldn't talk about it in English. In itself, though, it's masterfully handled, with the narration given by a later-protag who regrets earlier-protag's choices but withholds the full details of how that regret came to be.

Then there are sections in different narrator voices and styles - poetry for the main narrator's son, diary excerpts for the oversee, newspaper clippings and letters, and so on. A really interesting mix, and yet the novel is fairly short, and the language pretty accessible (I would hesitate to set, say, The Colour Purple, to low B2 students, for the density of the dialect - although I juré'd one exam on it this year that went well).

Paradise Lost by John Milton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I FINALLY FINISHED PARADISE LOST. Welp. That sure was an experience.

I forbear to try to review it, as a work in its own right. I will say that the medium by which I experienced it - Anthony Oliveira's podcast 'The Devil's Party', consisting of readings followed by 30-40 minute discussion episodes, was great. I've tried before and cannot get through it on the page (what that says about me, given I can read Middle English off the page, I do not know), and even in audio format my attention kept straying. The reading followed by the discussions, in which Anthony goes back and quotes chunks, was absolutely the necessary format (well, save for 'taking a class on it') for my little brain.

It took NEARLY TWO YEARS. I will not be doing Paradise Regained. I would, however, very much like something similar for The Faerie Queen, early modernists, please and thank.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was a deeply infuriating mix of 'things I wish I had read ten years ago' and 'wow, heteronormative, cisnormative, much?' Wild one-two of validation-invalidation.

The best chapter by far is the last, and that would be because that's the chapter which engages in depth with queer theory - Foucault and Edelman in particular. There's a shorter version at Granta if you're interested.

The problem with this book is it pronounces repeatedly on what 'women' are like, and while very often it says things about women that are true of me and which I have not seen articulated as such outside of weird Christian discourses (or kink discourses- but there, rarely limited to 'women'), it ... just... keeps doing the thing. With the essentialism. Angel acknowledges there are wide variances not only to individual women's makeup but to social structures bearing upon women - she makes no claim to speak for Black women, but does regularly nod to Black writers who have written on adjacent topics. Whereas for trans and queer women, and indeed queer men, she merely footnotes in the first chapter that she thinks it likely what she has to say will resonate but it's for someone else to do the work.

... as if trans and queer writers haven't been *doing* that work, of unpacking what it means to desire, the difference between arousal and desire, the intersection between sex and and sexual self, and so on. As if trans and queer communities haven't been forging that themselves, while the sexologists whom Angel rightly critiques have been busy measuring engorgement and the straight ladies busy telling each other that you cannot really enjoy sex with others until you know exactly what you want, somehow divorced from who you want.

Even when Angel draws on queer theory, she doesn't... engage... with queer anything. In fact it's almost as if she doesn't engage with *gender* despite writing about the gender binary?

She's an academic: she can do better. I'm reasonably certain that if this went to peer review someone would demand she do better, but here it is, and she hasn't.

Anne, la maison aux pignons verts by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read the Radio Canada audiolivre version, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. The narration pace is clear enough for my inexpert ears, and warmly read with a nice range of "voices" (none of them as farcical as the fr. audiolivres of Harry Potter, either, which is nice). I now have a whole suite of delightfully archaic vocabulary at my disposal, too: fear me.

Online Fiction: Stephanie Burgis, 'The Wrong Foot' (Podcastle, 2014). This is very cute and yet... I was not entirely satisfied with the romantic arc. At first I thought 'missed opportunity queer', and then I thought that, queer or not, I might have preferred this story through the _other_ young woman's eyes. Why the girl trying to get out of being Cinderella, and not the girl *helping* her escape?

Up Next: Well I'd LIKE to think I'll finish some other things, get through some more of the TBR. But we all know the audio-livre of Anne of Avonlea beckons me.

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Some links!

Maha Nassar (Forward.com, 2018), "From the river to the sea" doesn't mean what you think it means. There's a lot here, including a very valuable recap of Palestinian positions on statehood prior to the adoption of the two-state position by Fatah.

Kim Tallbear and Angela Wiley (Imaginations 10.1, 2019), "Critical Relationality: Queer, Indigenous, and Multispecies Belonging Beyond Settler Sex & Nature".. This is so good! I need to work some acknowledgement of it into my Book1 intro, I think, because it's doing work rarely done by white people, even white queer thinkers. Vis:

The naturalization of settler monogamy depends as much upon distinguishing love from friendship and other forms of affinity as it does the pathologization of promiscuity or non-monogamy (Willey 2016, 72). The valuation of friendship as a site of intimacy, meaning-making, resource sharing, and transformation has the potential to unravel stories about the specialness of sex and to fuel our imaginations to rethink forms and structures that exceed the ideal of the settler family, which may sustain and remake us.

Also, the description of co-writing as a Relationship will, I think, resonate for a lot of us who've done our time in fandom.

Elisheva Goldberg (Jewish Currents, 2020), The road to nowhere: gives case studies and a legal history of one type of "illegitimate" Palestinian town within Israel, the kind which are frequently slapped with demolition orders.

Dorothy M. Zellner (Jewish Currents), What We Did: How the Jewish Communist Left Failed the Palestinian Cause. Obviously polemical, but I also found this really interesting as a personal history of American Jewish newspapers through Zellner's eyes.

Franki Cookney (Own blog), Feelings don't exist in a vaccuum. This could double as two of my pet peeves: Problems With Polyamory Discourse and Problems With Millenial Straight Women Sex Discourse- it's actually mostly the latter, which is par for the course for Cookney, who is in fact polyamorous and bi but mostly engages with straight women centric sex writing.

Emily Hunsinger (The New Yorker, 2019), How to draw a horse. Apparently the difficulty of drawing horses is a meme amongst comic artists, here deployed to good memoir use.

Chris Baranuik (The Atlantic), Whatever happened to the phone phreaks. Analog telephone hackers, oh my! Loved this, do recommend.

Courtney Cook (Guardian US), Exerpt from 'The Way She Feels. This seems like a good memoir, but also, *startlingly* positive depiction of inpatient treatment and DBT therapy - I read this right off the back of having read a few #madcovid blog posts and it gave me mental whiplash.

Ky Merkley (Society for Classical Studies home page), In dialogue: trans studies and classics: a conversation with Vanessa Stovall and Mary Beard. This, following an indident where a trans student from Brisbane tweeted to the void that MB (not tagged) follows a lot of TERFS, and MB put said student on blast, was... disappointing to me at the time (for one thing, I drew from it the probability that MB does not read her twitter timeline; but it never actually... dug into that, while nevertheless repeating that different 'generations' use twitter differently), and is laughable given she did the same thing to another trans classicist recently who *hadn't even mentioned her by name*. But, yanno, it exists. I read it. I admire Stovall and Merkley for trying.