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.

Music:

Did anyone order queer swing-band vibes? Because I found queer swing-band vibes:



I found Hen in the Foxhouse with Jem Violet (no album or ep, but four singles out) via the Queer Country blog, but their oevre is more indie miscellaneous than country, and this piece is leaning toward jazz and swing. It is Good, Actually.

Otherwise, I've been listening to Flume's album Skin on repeat. I bought it back in 2016, for the track with Kai, and liked it but never got _fixated_ until now. Strange are the ways of the neurodivergent brain, I knew it was hyperfixation material, I just didn't know when its moment would come:



Podcasts / youtube discussions:

I've been puttering ahead with Paradise Lost (now past the tower of Babel! Getting there!). The two stand-outs of my week though were from the A Bit Lit podcast (links go to the website with youtube, look them up on your podcast app if you prefer):

Bodie Ashton on German nationhood, unexpected snails, and the pet shop boys. I have a very transparent brain and sartorial crush on Bodie, and perhaps this is a good case study in why.

Becky Yearling on early modern satire.

A Bit Lit is really a saving grace of 2021 for me: when I've failed to get much done in a work day, I scan through the podcast for items vaguely related to my research interests and listen while cooking. It's filling a ton of knowledge gaps, at a far lower executive function cost than sourcing, sitting down to read, and then annotating, books.

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Some links of possible interest:

David Clark (own blog), Losing and Finding My Voice. I really admire Clark's academic work, and this is a lovely little personal piece about work, embodiment and creativity.

Arundhati Roy (Guardian UK), We are witnessing a crime against humanity. On COVID in India.

Monica Hesse (WaPo), Philip Roth and the sympathetic biographer: This is how misogyny gets cemented in our culture. Went back to re-read this after reading Elaine Showalter's review in the TLS. I have great respect for Showalter (Teaching Literature made quite an impact on me) but wow, that showed a startling lack of feminist interrogation of the Roth-Bailey relationship, even granted that it came out before the accusations against Bailey surfaced. Hesse is better.

Paul Collier (TLS), The days of rampant individualism are over. I mostly hate-read this. Collier describes himself as a '68er, but puts today's social frictions down to his generation destroying the cohesion that comes with conservatism (I think? It's a little hard to tell), apparently entirely unaware of, like... leftist collectivisms? Baffling. I suppose it's what one gets when one reads the TLS.

Peter K. Andersson (TLS), Monarcho: A Megalomaniac Jester at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Some cool historical information here, although I would have appreciated a little more interrogation of the 'megalomaniac' framing via critical disability studies.

Andrew Motion (TLS), Dreams that take my breath: the reserved defiance of Charlotte Mew. TIL: when people talk about 'georgian' and poets, they don't mean the Georgian period!

James Romm (TLS), In the footsteps of Alexander: review of Wheatley and Dunn's 'Demetrius the Beseiger'

Ophelia Field (TLS), Marriage à la mode? A notorious case of high-society bigamy. Review of Catherline Ostler's book on Elizabeth Chudleigh.

Laura O'Brien (TLS), Lives less ordinary: How a family prospered from the French Revolution. Review of Emma Rothschild's 'An Infinite History', which seems to be an example of that excellent genre of tightly-focused archival history studies, following one provincial family through the post-revolution years. Paging monksandbones, suspect this is your jam; if it's paywalled hit me up via email.

Lindsay Hilsom (TLS), Red ink and machetes: Ethnic strife on a Rwandan hilltop in Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga. Added THIS to my endless TBR, yes yes.

Emma Smith (TLS), Getting the Measure: The character and development of the Arden Shakespeare. This is ostensibly a review of the latest edition of Measure for Measure, but it's also a really cool historiography of the Arden series.

Jaime Herndon (Bookriot), Dead women poets are not your punchline. Herndon is overcoming a sense of cringe at their love for Plath and Sexton. As someone who was told I *should* like Plath (because I was a teenage girl writing angsty free verse) and bounced off her hard, I actually really appreciated this take.

Brandon Hogan and Jacobi Adeshi Carter (NYT), Opinion: there is no Classics catastrophe at Howard. Both work at Howard (although not in the Classics department); the piece is a reply to Cornell West, but also a really interesting take on what we consider essential 'cultural' education and why.

Music:

Bethel Steele has failed to grab me, although continues to be pleasant background noise. Meanwhile, I bought Rhiannon Giddens' (formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops) new album sight unseen, and... I don't know what I expected but it's not that! It's GOOD, but it's not country - a fascinating mix of celtic, classical/operatic, blues, all sorts of things. The common thread is laments - loss of place and loss of people.

The album closes with one of the loveliest versions of Amazing Grace I've ever heard:

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Podcasts:

Not much, of late - more Paradise Lost, another episode of Unwell.

Plus, via the Lightspeed Magazine podcast, Persephone of the Crows. A good story.

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Links, Miscellaneous:

Peter Kurth (Salon, 1999), "The Trouble with Normal" by Michael Warner. Review / synthesis of some queer theory I've not read but which had me punching the air going 'yes, this'.

Beth Nguyen (The New Yorker), America ruined my name for me: so I chose a new one

Mellissa Febos (NYT), Prologue to "Girlhood". (CN: needles, drug use)

Charmaine Chua (own blog), Slow Boat to China, The quiet port is logistics' nightmare and Landlessness and the life of seamen. Three episodes in an old blog series about the authors' anthropological research as an observer on a mega container ship.

Frida Damani (Jeune Afrique), Tunisie : « Michel Foucault n’était pas pédophile, mais il était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes ». To find this investigative piece, which debunks Sorman's claim by checking with the residents of Sidi Bou Saïd (TL;DR Foucault certainly slept with young people, but older teenage boys who were absolutely considered adults by their society. Yes, orientalist sex tourism; no, not pedophilia) I had to read this piece in Lundi Matin (in English), which is justifiably critical of Sorman but also, like, thinks that people taking the Foucault accusations seriously is because of #metoo and a culture of excessive victim-believing? When the whole point of the Jeune Afrique piece is that no victims, or any North Africans at all have made this claim.

Patrick McKenzie (own site), Falsehoods Programmers believe about names. I've read this before, and perhaps so have you, but it's always good for a re-visit.

Ed Cumming (The Guardian), Catterpillar wars. I don't usually repost links to current affairs, but this whole Colin the Catterpillar thing was SO BIZARRE, and the article is amusing.

Gareth Millward (AHA Perspectives), Vaccine hesitancy is a 21-century phenomenon. Not because no one had reservations, but because until eradication became the goal, a small number of avoidant people didn't need persuading - time was better spent on increasing *access* for those who struggled to prioritise vaccination.

Robbins Libraries / Margaret Sheble, Reclaiming the death of a beautiful woman: a digital exhibit on women's art of the Lady of Shallot.

breathedout Many endings can be happy, you know?. Big mood.

Mark Mazower (TLS), Revolutionary reckonings: Greek independence, 1821 and the historians. I do not know enough about Greek independence, clearly!

Jeffrey Wasserstrom (TLS), The Good China Story? Literature as a nation’s lifeblood. Review of multiple books, and a sort of stock-taking of a the current moment in Chinese (domestic and diaspora) literature. Fascinating. I also don't know enough about early 20th c Chinese revolutionary movements.

Music: Continuing my adventures in queer country, I'm still very much loving Clyde Petersen with Your Heart Breaks, 'Drone Butch Blues'. I also bought Bethel Steele, 'Of Love and Whiskey', which is good background noise but no particular song has grabbed me yet.

Podcasts / Youtube:

Fiction:

Further progress on Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have received their eviction notice.

Ken Liu, An Advanced Reader's Picture Book of Cognition, Escape Pod recording. Listened to this with Shiny and Metamour. Described it as 'some of the rare hard sci-fi I like'. Mr Trains, conversely, described it as 'designed to appeal to female sci-fi fans'. Shiny cried at it. My efforts to recommend not distressing fiction are going well, as you can see.

Discussion, Lit, etc:

Julia Ftatek (Romancing the Gothics Youtube class), Byron, Manfred and the Transgender Self. I love how Ftatek navigates historicity and trans readings.

Ian Burrows (A Bit Lit - both podcast and youtube), Shakespeare for Snowflakes, in conversation with Emma Whipday.

Academic Events / Round Tables / Etc:

A talk from UCD that I can't remember the title of, on researching distressing topics. Mostly about doing oral history, but very interesting.

Part two of the Shakespeare, Race and Queer Sexuality series from Lafeyette College, a conversation between Simone Chess and actor Skyler Cooper. I really loved the way Cooper talked about gender in general, and especially about Shakespeare as a site for gender exploration for him - although he put that down to 'he writes *human* stories', very bardolatory, which I find unsatisfactory. (I need to catch up on part one)

Sex, Rage and Change: Feminist Adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from the Classical Reception Studies Network and the University of the South in Sewanee - Stephanie McCarter (academic translator), Paisley Rekdal (poet) and Nina Maclaughlin (short stories) in conversation. Sadly no public video after the event.

The latter two really threw my sleep cycle out this week, but were totally worth it. Although it was annoying that I only discovered AFTER opening the link to the Skyler Cooper one that it wasn't a YouTube livestream, it was an unlisted recording, despite the program having a time on it. Could've watched it the next morning...

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Some links, of many links I have backed up:

Sophie Lewis (Nplusone Magazine), My Octopus Girlfriend: On Erotophobia. Remember the twitter Discourse about the sexy octopus? I never even saw the original tweet. This is by the woman who had got high, watched a documentary, and described the relationship between a guy and an octopus as erotic. It's a very good analysis of, amongst other things, the documentary My Octopus Teacher; the backlash to her tweets; and porous boundaries of concepts like sex and eroticism. Also it includes the line 'who among us can be sure that we have not had sex with an octopus?'

Kristin Hussey (Kopenhagen museum of medicine), Saving the sunshine: health, chronobiology and daylight saving time. On the origins of daylight saving time (nothing to do with cows).

Esther Anatolis (Meanjin, Winter 2020), The long tail of the Bauhaus. Meanjin sometimes runs interesting articles on urban planning and design, and this is one of them.

Karen O'Connel (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Inheriting Hunger. On food, love, and intergenerational trauma.

Muhunnad Al-wehwah (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Mixtape, Side A: on cassette tapes used to record and send messages between Australia and Palestine.

Claire G. Coleman (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Hidden in plain sight: on discovering her grandfather was Indigenous, and the 'Hidden Generation' of those who, like her father, grew up unaware that one parent was Indigenous (a tactic that saved them from removal by the government of the day).

Daniel Nour (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Mamas boy. On growing up as an Arab-Australian man.

Sarah Sasson (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Attachment. Every so often Meanjin publishes pieces on traumatic birth, miscarriage, and other fertility related issues. This is a traumatic birth one. Very striking, in a lot of ways. Not least because Sasson brushes so quickly over the part where she was traumatised and her husband complained he was 'ruining the happiest day of [his] life'. Inexplicably, she does not seem to have yeeted him into the sun right then or at any time since.

Matilda Dixon-Smith (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Taking female queerness from subtext to text: review of Laura McPhee-Brown, Cherry Beach. Weird stance to take that there isn't non-subtextual f-queer lit out there? But convinced me to add Cherry Beach to my list.

Ben Eltham, The Class of Culture: a rather sceptical review of Brook, O'Brien and Taylor, Culture is Bad For You that both summarises said book's apparently quite interesting proposition and then pokes some holes in it in interesting ways.

Matthew Wills (JStor Daily), The Bluestockings

Xanthe Mallet (The Conversation AU), Cultural Misogyny, and why men's aggression to women is so often expressed through sex.

Paulina Bren (LitHub), How the Barbizon gave Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion freedom and autonomy. This essay, extracted from Bren's book on the Barbizon, doesn't quite... work as an extract (assumes too much background knowledge) and doesn't actually do what the title says it does but it IS interesting and I am interested in the book from which it comes.

Tom Woodhouse (The MERL blog), The Tractor Whisperers: my favourite April Fool this year.

Christina Forgarasi (Public Books), Empathy beyond therapy: a review of Sigrid Nunez's latest, that linked me to a few other interesting reads.

Tom Geoghegan (BBC, 2013), Why do so many Americans live in mobile homes?. Something on Twitter made me realise that when Americans talk about mobile homes / trailer parks, they don't just mean Caravans and RVs (which I would also call caravans). So I read this article about them.

Merve Emre (LARB), Critical Love Studies. A response and homage to Sam See.

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.

Something I'm thinking about a lot this year is an occasion when, in hindsight, I was actually sexually harrassed at work. I didn't notice at the time, because I was newly aware of myself as queer, and I registered it as *homophobic* hostility, albeit of a generalist masculine display sort rather than directed at me.

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These days, I am researching intersections between disgust and humour: why is disgust fun? Why is it funny to disgust others? It turns out that still shot I was shown is part of the Internet Hall of Fame: it's known as 'Lemon Party', and like Goatse and Two Girls One Cup, it is one of the pornographic counterparts of the humble RickRoll and the NumaNuma song. One tricked one's internet peers (and sometimes ones real life peers) into viewing undesirable content: Lemon Party and Goatse because they are explicitly or implicitly homoerotic; Two Girls (and to an extent Goatse) because of the scatological humour / kink intersection. RickRoll is genuinely harmless, its joke resting on the overly earnest and unfashionable popsong, while the NumaNuma video's prank appeal rests on combined fatphobia and mockery of the chap in question's earnest enjoyment of the song. Somehow, as an odd badge of pride, I can tell you I've never been internet-pranked into any of these: I somehow became skilled at spotting and dodging them, and Lemon Party simply never crossed my radar. Consequently, it wasn't until I read mentions of it in academic literature that I realised it was a specific meme-based prank and not a random act of homophobia that I had encountered in late 2008 or early 2009.

Now, when I think about that exchange in the restaurant, it seems glaringly obvious to me that I, and the other female staff, were subject to heterosexual sexual harrassment: pushing pornography into our working relationship was obviously an act of sexualised intimidation. Even the intent to disgust is wrapped up in ye olde hetero power dynamics: eliciting an affective response over us, in the domain of sexuality, without touching us or even implying sexual interest in us. But I do think there's something different here to, say, showing het porn that the aggressor might presumably enjoy - perhaps that's what lifts it into the realm of humour? There isn't a sense of unwanted intimacy, such as even something relatively tame like pin-up calendars elicits (now you know exactly what kind of big tits your colleagues like). I'm fairly sure my straight women colleagues would have reacted differently to straight porn, or lesbian porn (either true dyke porn or girl-on-girl-for-male-viewers); and the kitchen blokes would not have found conventionally attractive gay porn a site of riotous amusement.

This past week I read NSFW: Sex, Humour and Risk in Social Media (well, read the intro and skimmed the rest for content specifically addressing gross-out pranks). What that book *doesn't* address sort of confirms that my first read on the situation might not have been so wrong: I think, at the time, the disgust > humour link was so strong, and the homophobic element so obvious, that many victims embraced the joke (and then passed it on). The authors of NSFW address Goatse and Lemon Party in the same context as 'Nimping' (of which I had never heard!), a prank that installed an app that played inescapable gay porn and shouted "hey everyone I'm watching gay porn!" across your workplace. They talk about how there's humour in disgust, in reasserting heteronorms via disgust-pranks; and about the humour of incongruity, as in the presence of porn in the workplace.

They DON'T talk about the specific dynamics involved in victimising certain people for these pranks - perhaps because Goatse, like Rickroll, seemed so all-pervasive at one point. But something like Nimping? Don't tell me that wasn't deliberately sent to men who were somehow failing to win at workplace masculinity. Part of the TEST is that the victim had to both perform disgust *and* treat it as a successfully executed amusing prank - by failing to perform disgust I violated the Rules of the exchange, and if I were read as a man or possibly even as a dyke at the time I would have opened myself to further homophobic harassment in so doing; but if I treated it as sexual harassment directed at me as a woman, I have absolutely no idea what would have happened, the violation of the prank rules of engagement was so inconceivable at the time.

I do think that even if it is the case that most people in the sphere of these pranks thought of them as pranks rather than harassment, an academic study ought to probe further. It is striking that the authors of NSFW quote studies which interviewed people about workplace humour, or about work/life boundaries and smutty jokes on social media (some one who was photographed holding some 'cock soup' - tinned soup with a cockerel on it - while on mental health leave, and the photo made it to facebook), they don't interview or cite any interviews with anyone who *disseminated* goatse, lemon party, two girls, or nimping; nor anyone on the receiving end. Even in the section entitled 'Harassment, Sex, and the Workplace', they focus on the fact that things which are harassment in one context may not be in another - without ever addressing the fact that these pranks *could be used to harass*, and who might be the most likely victims. Even when mentioning the homophobic nature of the joke, they don't address the probability that queer people would therefore be targeted. It's... disappointing, honestly.

And yet, while failing to treat gross-out pranks as harassment, they *also* don't address consensual gross-out practices! I am aware of people who trawl the A03 for the grossest or most pathetic or worst written or preferably all three porn they can find; I assume this happens with video porn, too (how else did Lemon Party end up screencapped?). Some people think its fun to seek out gross content: they then either spring it on unconsenting people, or, I've been told, engage in group competitive gross-outs with similarly minded friends. I am fairly sure that some of *that* underlay the viral success of goatse, lemon party, two girls, etc.

All up, useful but disappointing. I did get some interesting anthropological cites on disgust, however, and will keep forging ahead. I've been reading up on intentionally disgusting literature, too, but most of what I've found is writing about disgust as deliberately challenging / edgy, not deliberately FUNNY. But there are many genres of disgusting literature that are not that: Paul Jennings is no William S. Burroughs, and 18th-cent Mock-Epic has more in common with Captain Underpants than with Samuel L. Delaney.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction For Fun: Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other - not much progress here.
Poetry: Still plodding onward with Paradise Lost
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: Made some headway with Feminist Theory from Margin To Center, am enjoying it. Foucault and Bond Stockton remain on hiatus.
Lit Mag: Some minor progress with the winter Meanjin, but not enough. Also, as if I didn't have enough of a backlog with Meanjin, i leveled up in bougieness and took out a TLS subscription. I keep picking up links to articles by medievalists and not being able to read them... so, I have three months electronic and hard copy, we'll see if I use it and if it's worth keeping up the hard copy.
For Work: Mary Devlin's Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage, aka 'Esmerelda from Hunchback goes on pilgrimage with Chaucer, and also with a woman who has been married five times but is less mouthy than the Wife of Bath so makes a less threatening POV character'. Hines' The Fabliau in English. Annotating Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works, still.

Recently Finished: Quite a lot, actually.

The Canterbury Trail by Angie Abdou

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This was going to get a 3 or even round up to a 4, but the ending was a complete cop-out AND not even plausibly excused as a 'retraction' à la Chaucer.

The Canterbury Tales by Seymour Chwast

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


It's hard to feel like Chwast actually LIKES the CT's, except maybe the Knight's Tale? And totally baffling dedication to doing The Whole Thing, including the cook and Melibee. Interesting to have a Prioress' Tale from a Jewish adaptor, but he ... doesn't... actually do anything interesting with it.


Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works: Critical Essays by Sharon Friedman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Extremely useful and relevant to my interests.


100 Demon Dialogues by Lucy Bellwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Absolutely adorable: 100 slice of life comics featuring discussions between the artist and her own inner demons.

Plus Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates, which is pretty good if out of date now. Neat format choices - it's a monograph but it's got textbook-like chapter blurbs and summaries, and discussion prompts. Also the intro to Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, which gave me some good cites, but is bafflingly ONLY about inter-religious polemic (Xns on Jews and Muslims, Jews on Xns and Muslims, Muslims on both), and doesn't address any of the three's depictions of heretics and or schismatics, or the sort of polemic that demands reform within a religion.

NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media by Susanna Paasonen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Both really interesting, and oddly gappy - f'r ex, despite sections entitled 'sex, harassment and the workplace', and despite addressing gross-out pranks, fails to actually grapple with gross-out pranks as either heterosexual harassment or homophobic harassment in the workplace. Weird.

And finally, I revisited the entire 'Circle of Magic' series by Tamora Pierce. Unlike the Song of the Lioness books, which I adored as a kid and still love, but which I see more and more holes in every time I read them, my respect for these ones only grows. Although this time I did have some side-eying about the depiction of the Traders (a mix of traits associated with Judaism and with the Roma, the latter mostly stereotypes; early on I thought Tammy Pierce took good and careful care to distinguish between antisemitic/racialised tropes believed about the Traders and what is actually truth of them, BUT. Their attitudes to outgroups were very heavy-handedly done: they seemed to genuinely believe non-traders were 'not real people', a belief which, afaik, is really only found to be *seriously* held in imperialist societies toward subordinate groups; if professed by a minority moving through a larger community it has a completely different valence). Nevertheless, as expected I was particularly struck by the epidemic in the fourth book: Briar resenting masks. Logistics people unprepared! Quarantine-dodging! Yeowch. The third book with its setting of a bad wildfire season was also tough to read after 2019 in Aus: I could feel the smoke scratch every time the text described Tris coughing.

Online fiction

Keerthik Sadisdharan (Mint Lounge), Krishna Speaks to Jara on his last night on earth. I did not understand this as well as I would like, but am filing it to return to later.

Maria Dhavana Headly (Tor.com), The Girlfriend's Guide To Gods. Not as impressed with this as I might have been a decade ago. It is, however, interesting in that I think it belongs in that genre of 'Heterosexual Disappointment Literature' I posited last week, but because it's so much less realistic than Cat Person it won't get put together like that.

Up Next:

Despite the long list of things finished, I have acquired EVEN MORE THINGS. A guide to mock-epic as a genre is probably next up.

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Some links:

Laura Dzubay (Electric Lit), Everyone else is in love and I'm just listening to Taylor Swift. There is a lot of good stuff here, but I particularly liked its perspective on the function of songs as giving shape to what love and desire ought to feel like. I remember being fascinated by certain songs because they grasped something that no amount of reading - not fantasy lit, not my Guide to Puberty book, not Margaret Clark's 'Secret Girls Stuff' and not the teen novels that were YA-before-YA in Australia - articulated for me.

Captain Awkward (Own Blog), I put my emotions in the fridge and went away for a few years and now I'm afraid of what's growing in there. The Captain is on a good streak lately - the one about the Gasp! Bisexual! Friend was good, too.

Greg Mania, interview with Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends is Scripture for Gay Dysfunction. Another for my growing list of not-saccharinely-wholesome-rep queer lit.

Liz Janssen (LARB, 2015), Uses of Displeasure: Literary Value and Affective Disgust. Reviewing Delaney's 'Hogg' (Content warning: everything), considers the way that disgust scrambles our normal habits of evaluating literature. I hated it but it's good. It's terrible but impressive. Brilliant but one star.

Macquarie Dictionary Blog (2015), Do you skull a beer?. I read something referencing the scandinavian toast 'skol', and hoped it might be linked to the Australian ritual of 'skull, skull, skull', because I have never been satisfied with the explanation that you skull a beer in one long sweep like you row a boat (why skull, and not just 'row' then?). That sounded like a backformation based on the popularity of 'boat race' drinking games.

R.O. Kwon (The Cut), The willful misunderstanding of kink. I wasn't happy with this: very simplistic 'kink is not abuse; if it's abuse it's not kink' stuff. I hoped for better from the Kwon & Greenwell collaboration. Alas, I then found this scathing negative review by Daemonium X of their anthology Kink, which was enough to convince me not to bother reading it at all.

Mya Byrne (Country Queer), Trans country artists you need to know, and Rachel Choist (Country Queer), Your guide to the butches of queer country.

Liat Kaplan (NYT), I was your fave is problematic. The person behind YFIP, then a teenager, regrets her life choices. Although as the person I got the link from (Waverly SM on twitter) pointed out, there are some ways in which this piece doesn't seem to accept accountability for what she actually did (as opposed to the role she may have played in Cancel Culture At Large, which I think she overstates): there's a glancing reference to 'a feud with a YA author over his inclusion', which probably refers to the part where the blog turned accusations of pedophilia and/or general sexual harassment against John Green into a fact Everyone Knew, on the basis not even of a first-hand submission but someone reporting that their friend said that he hugged her without permission. I... don't know what's the correct point at which to move stories like that from whisper network to exposé, but YFIP's interests were never with the victims, or even with warning people *for their safety*, but with hurting the named people and shaming those who like them (thus the 'your fave' framing). In this article she talks about wanting to make people hurt, but not so much about the shaming of her peers aspect, which I always thought was stronger.

Robin Dembroff (pre-print of an article for TSQ), Cisgender Commonsense & Philosophy’s Transgender Trouble. This is a really good read on the topic of 'why are so many philosophers transphobic as fuck'. I would like to get further confirmation about certain basic methods of analytic philosophy - Dembroff cites a professor who, when he was a student, responded to his promise to 'read more on the topic of X' with 'don't read, THINK', and links that with the broader unwillingess of mainstream philosophers to read trans philosophy, feminist philosophy, or philosophers of colour. The assumption is, apparently, that one should start from commonly agreed facts and build up; the idea that one might need to research, or that commonly agreed facts might be wrong, is, per Dembroff, anathema. This is... certainly an explanation for Philosophy Bros in lit classes, but so wildly different from how philosophy is approached by lit scholars (Dembroff does note he's talking about analytic philosophy; and lit scholars love continental philosophy, perhaps that's the difference) that, I, er, want to read more on the topic.

Courtesy of, well, the inevitable result of reading 8-10 things at once, and also of spending a week cat-sitting in Fribourg. Why working in someone else's house should get more reading done than working in my own, I do not know, but that's how it is.

Meanwhile, the most striking thing I read this fortnight, I think, is the essay Fucking Like A Housewife, by Jamie Hood, in The New Enquiry. It's a personal essay, with an artful mix of abstraction, self-exposure, and ironic reflexive comments, by a trans woman on desire and disappointment. I picked up the link from the substack/blog 'It's David', on the basis of this incredibly striking line: "A fantasy is at its heart a survivalist lie."

Cast your minds back to July 2019, when The Crane Wife came out. I posited that The Crane Wife is just one in a recurring genre of women's writing (although I wouldn't be surprised if there were also similar from gay men, or nonbinary people; I would be very surprised and FASCINATED to find its like from cis straight men). I can't exactly define it: the Disappointment Memoir, perhaps? The short story 'Cat Person' belongs here, too, although personally I didn't find it that engaging. But just as important as disappointment is desire, thwarted potential, hunger. Jess Zimmerman's Hunger Makes Me is another example. I'd put Lucia Osborne-Crowley's Meanjin Papers essay from Winter 2020, Depreciated: The Price of Love in there, too, although it was far too niche and Australian to go viral.

When these essays go viral, they seem to spark cathartic identification. And they do in me, too (to varying degrees; Cat Person was a particular low). And yet I find myself frustrated, over and over, at how... straight they are. The disappointment and despair that pervades them is, on the one hand, familiar: I, too, have dated Men (TM), but the sense of compulsion, that this must work because this is all there is? It's... odd, to read, as a queer woman. I could say yes, this is the double bind of the heteropatriarchy: how lucky for me, that this is not all there is for me. And I'm not arguing that it *isn't* structural. But I don't think it's actually limited to heterosexuality, the gaping void of desiring and needing and loving and somehow never being enough to get your own needs met or even, it feels, acknowledged. You can find its threads in all kinds of queer memoirs, and complicated tangled versions: of giving and loving and yet not being able to provide what the other party needs, and so on. Never surfaces in viral essay form, though, which is a shame: my gut instincts tell me that for queer women, especially, the ways in which this story grows in us aren't so far off from the ways - especially the ways outside of primary partnership - that the same story grows in straight women.

Let me know when someone writes a queer woman Disappointment Memoir Piece.

Hood's essay isn't the one I'm looking for; for one thing, nowhere does it suggest that Hood would identify as queer (perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn't; this essay is exclusively about her as a trans woman dating men). But it IS a version of the Desire/Disappointment memoir that won't go viral on account of not being "relatable" to enough people - in fact it's probably actively off-putting to most people who identified with 'The Crane Wife'. The desire in which Hood is repeatedly thwarted is the desire to be "a Housewife": to be allowed, invited, cherished in that most protected of feminine roles; to be able to offer love-as-service; all the things that her straight cis counterparts find constraining. She interrogates this desire, it's playing out as kink, it's function as a "survivalist lie", and the ways in which that fantasy might be a vehicle for desires more basic and more terrifying not to receive. I recommend it, both as a piece that deserves to be alongside the viral Desire/Disappointment genre, and as a fine example of personal essay craft in its own right.

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Currently Reading: Oh so many things, as usual
Fiction for Fun: Bernadine Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other', and Tamora Pierce's The Magic in the Weaving. I've been craving the Circle books since March, for obvious Pandemic reasons; bought them for Xmas and only got around to them now. I'm finding them so soothing. The Evaristo.. hmm. It's mostly portraits of people, so far, through the perspectives of first Amma, a middle-aged dramatist, and then her daughter Yazz. I was enjoying it until the switch to Yazz, and then... Evaristo is gentle with Amma's foibles and failings, but Yazz feels like a sharper satire, in places. Her apparently unassailable confidence in her own rightness and the wrongness of adults may yet be modulated, but the bit about her faking anxiety to get a larger room in halls gives me pause. She's starting to feel like a straw-gen-z, I suppose.
Poetry: puttering onward with Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: Not quite halfway through Winter 2020 Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: I haven't picked up the hooks or the Foucault since l last did a Reading Post, oops.
For work: Got to get back to 'The Fabliau in English' now, I guess.

Recently Finished: 'The Lotus Palace' should've gone in last update, actually, as opposed to 'ABSOLUTELY NOTHING', which is what I claimed.

The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this and will definitely be following up on the series. It's a combo historical mystery and historical romance, set in the pleasure quarter of Tang Dynasty Chang'an. The worldbuilding / historical research is rich and rewarding without ever overwhelming the plot. Protags fascinating, Our Heroine's occasional bits of unreliable (or withholding) narration deftly deployed. My quibble with it is the pacing / twining of the mystery and romance plots and their respective generic demands. The fortuitous mechanics to allow the Happily Ever After come too quickly and with too little detail in comparison to the mystery plot, which might be okay if they were a rapid fade-out, but then we stick around for the last odds and ends of the mystery plot to be likewise deus-ex-machina'd.

Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I devoured this and enjoyed it, and yet. I read it and loved it in its prior online existence, and wasn't sure how it could be improved. For the most part it IS significantly improved: the worldbuilding and political plot are much strengthened. Oddly, though, some things were lost in the shift that make the mystery plot - and the villain of the final crisis- less compelling. And I am not happy with the logics of how gender and sexuality work in this expanded universe: long story not for covering here, I feel. (DW note: that's a post under lock if you have access but missed it.)

A Companion to Literature and Film by Robert Stam

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think I had this out by mistake (instead of A Companion to Film and Adaptation). Couple of useful essays though.



Spinning by Tillie Walden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was beautifully executed, but oddly difficult to read: the art style and minimalist text somehow really effectively conveys a sense of trapped combination drive and despair that's a Lot.


Pending next update: a couple of weird Canterbury Tales adaptations, and 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works'

Online Fiction:

Adam Ouston (Meanjin Winter 2020), The Velvet Plain. This is... as close to sci-fi as Meanjin gets. Surrealist. Maybe it's enviro-fiction? Maybe it's not. Warning for some brutality.

Rebecca Slater (Meanjin Winter 2020) Scales. This one definitely is climate fiction, and the surreal elements more easily interpretable as metaphor. Not one that will stick with me for a long time.

Pauline Melville (Electric Lit), Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary discuss their suicides. I definitely want to read the collection from which this draws, and am slightly annoyed it has no online footprint beyond this so I can't file it in goodreads.

Phoebe Barton (Lightspeed Magazine), The Mathematics of Fairyland. This is sweet (cn: suicidality), but not as mathematical as I had hoped.

Up Next: I need to prioritise for work: stuff on fabliau as genre, stuff on violence and humour. Everything else as whim takes me.

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Some links:

Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon (LitHub), Taking Kink Seriously: A Reading List.

Cara Giamo (Atlas Obscura Feb 2019), The celebrity tortoise breakup that rocked the world

Franki Cookney (The Overthinkers Guide to Sex, blog), The best bad sex I ever had. At the time I couldn’t quite articulate it. It felt like having sex with someone who didn’t actually like sex, I remember saying to a friend. Cookney connects that to Peggy Ornstein's reseach on (straight) young men and sexuality in a way that is, shall we say, Not Wrong.

Atlas Obscura place entry, Méret Oppenheim fountain. Saw this unexpectly this past week in Bern. It is WEIRD.

Douglas Dowland (The Rambling), Flirting with Foucault. Dowland uses Eric Wade's memoir of Foucault's time in California, during which Wade (and his partner) "flirted" (per Dowland) with Foucault, to put forward an argument about flirting as generative of thought, friendship, philosophy. I would like to be on board with this argument, I really would, but I am thrown by the fact that from Dowland's description what happened here is Foucault turned down a speaking invitation, Wade ambushed him at a different event and wangled his way into his graces by offering to drive him to a site he wanted to see, plied him with substances and asked him wildly personal questions about his sex life. Nice to know even Foucault gets sexually harassed on the job??

Lizzie O'Shea (Overland), Facebook vs the media code: whoever wins, we lose. I read this trying to figure out what the rationale for the 'make google and facebook >>pay for news<<' thing is. I have gone from baffled to impressed at the gall. It's not a copyright based argument at all, it's a sheer power grab. And one that will profit Murdoch more than most.

Amanda Meade (Guardian), Google and Facebook: the landmark Australian law that will make them pay for news content. I had to read this one to check I wasn't misunderstanding.

Ketan Joshi (RenewEconomy), Google's Sky News Australia team-up will make it a climate misinformation powerhouse. This is Not Good, folks.

Sonja Blignaut (Own blog), On depletion - as different to fatigue.

Julia Ftatek (The Rambling), Jonathan and Taylor: the two Swifts. I really enjoyed this one, do recommend.

David (own blog/substack), David Davis XVIII: Part 3, 'good for you'. Cautions against 'therapeutic' justifications for kink. I don’t care if it’s good for me. It doesn’t need to be good for me for me to be allowed to do it.

Robin Craig (Looking At Porn blog/substack), Tickling. I love humans, humans are so great and come up with so many niche things.

Neelanjana Banjeree, interview with Randa Jarrar (Harpers Bazaar), There is a bigger world: Randa Jarrar on her memoir 'Love is an Ex-Country'.

I hesitate to call it traumatised, because it's not quite that personal; I'm fine, my family are fine, it's the shadow of living with Unprecedented Times.

Sounds like I'm talking about COVID-19, and maybe I will be in a few years, but right now that's a weird sort of normal. It's gone on so long and taken up far more of my life in Bern than was pandemic-free that it's just part of the furniture now. Australia's apocalypse summer, though, I flew out in the middle of it. I didn't realise how much it would haunt me. It's possible that part of the reason I've been less shaken by the pandemic, by being abroad in a pandemic, than many is that it hit just after the fire danger passed (literally: the fire crisis response headquarters in NSW was handed over to the multi-agency COVID response team, one crisis handing over to another). This Australian summer is cooler and humid in the east; Perth is having a mini-apocalypse right now, but it's not been a whole summer of it. I remember tensing myself in spring for a combined apocalypse, an Australian-intensity rerun of the western US's fire season with plague related shelter-in-place orders clashing with fire evacuations, and somehow, somehow, the apocalypse did not double down.

Today, I looked out the window and the sky was, sort of, still grey, but the houses across from me looked to yellow. It unnerved me. 'If I was in Sydney,' I said to my Australian partner, 'I'd be saying it was bushfire weather.' It wasn't. 'A couple of times in Geneva we had Sahara dust storms,' I said. 'I don't think they come this far north.' Turns out, they do. All this afternoon Swiss twitter has been sharing pictures of the yellow-filtered sky. It's eerie, my friends say. Creepy. I remember thinking that in Geneva. In Canberra, when we had dust storms there. I'd photograph it, keen to show people the weird-ass sky.

Despite the swiss news assuring us there is no risk to health in the cloud, the particles are too small, I couldn't convince myself to go outside. I couldn't must the 'hey isn't this weird, document it for posterity' energy. My brain was reaching for 'this is weird THIS IS APOCALYPTIC oh glod document it to try to get some sense of enormity oh glod', but of course... it's not. It's just the weather here. It's not even a climate-change driven extraordinary feature (q: why aren't there literary references to this phenomeon? Am I reading the wrong literature I've never even seen a 'lo in that year there was an orange sky' medieval chronicle type thing quoted in this context!).

My eyes and instincts were telling me something unthinkable, dangerous, literally deadly was happening, and yet... well, it is, but not because of the sand. That's the pandemic, the background noise.

Is this trauma? I suppose it is. The Journal of Traumatic Stress already have a COVID issue. People are talking about a generation-defining traumatic experience akin to the Great Depression. The Apocalypse Summer (what are we calling it? I've seen it called Black Summer, having outstrippped both Black Friday and Black Saturday) must surely be the same, and yet. It's disappeared into the recesses of our minds as the pandemic rolls on, and this present Australian summer has been cool and humid.

I'm reading the Winter (Aus) issue of Meanjin. Slow, I'm behind on issues, having trouble consuming content away from the screen. I'm reading articles written in (australian) autumn, when the fires were barely passed and the pandemic just manifesting itself. I feel disoriented in time. Lucy Treloar writes of 'Writing the Apocalypse':

I’m so angry with politicians that I take beta-blockers to calm my racing heart before going to sleep. Geoff Goldrick writes: ‘2019 may go down in history as Year Zero of the climate apocalypse. The tsunami of extreme events has been so relentless that each is quickly forgotten in favour of its successor.’

He lists the events. I had forgotten the Menindee fish kills and the immolation of Tasmanian forests dating to the last ice age. I had forgotten.

There are two more months of summer to go, but news broadcasts have stopped mentioning the word. Effortlessly, the boundaries of that old season blur and disappear. We have ‘bushfire season’ now. There is no ‘summerness’ this year. As a matter of course the weather report now includes fire alerts, the status of existing fires, the winds that will exacerbate them, fire probability and fire bans. Also the temperature.

I had forgotten the first summer of 2019, too. I wasn't there, of course, but it was a constant background to my winter and spring, via the social media. The fish kills, in particular, shook me. And I had forgotten. That won't be Year Zero: Year Zero will be 2020, with the second half of the 2019-20 fires, and then floods, and then pandemic, and then storms and more pandemic. All those other horrors of 2019 will be relegated, in our story-telling brains, to 'ominous build-up'.

I'm reading work written in Australia as I was settling in here in Bern, work that grapples with the reality of the fires and says: surely, now we must do something. Work that looks at the early stages of COVID-19 and says: our economic system is bankrupt, surely, now, we must do something. I feel cruel, like I have to let these essays down and say: oh, you sweet summer children. You underestimate our clinging to the old. You underestimate our collective ability to cope: faced with two crises at once, we can deny both.

I'm reading essays about the bushfire crisis and I'm homesick. Homesickness smells like smoke, now. I left Australia over 12 months ago. I was only home for four months, but that was the longest time in seven years, and most of it pervaded with the smell of smoke. I miss the smell of smoke. I look outside to the sepia-toned sky, and it doesn't smell of smoke, and my hindbrain is afraid because it looks like apocalyptic danger; and yet, I miss the smell of smoke.

I am not quite shaking, writing this. And I miss the smell of smoke.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Everina Maxwell's 'Winter's Orbit', which I bought even though I have a huge TBR, because I was in a Mood and wanted to binge-read. Did I succeed? No. Reading in fits and starts, still. I'm overall liking the improvements on plot and intrigue in comparison to the 'online draft' version as we are calling it now.
Poetry: Nothing more with Paradise Lost since the Listening Post update.
Lit Mag: As you may have gathered, Winter 2020 Meanjin.
Non Fiction for Personal Interest: A great many things at once. Tillie Walden's 'Spinning', still. bell hooks and foucault, both of which I dipped into for the book proposal but am determined to actually read properly this time.
For work: Also a great many things. Annotating the Jost collection 'Chaucer's Humor', which continues to be stodgy but useful. 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works', in fits and starts. Angie Abdou's A Canterbury Trail, which I am starting to realise will not actually involve a story-telling competition, and thus is less useful than I had hoped.

Recently Finished: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING hard copy since last update. Ooops.

Online Fiction:

Re-read The Archivist by Eris Young (Selkie Magazine). Read it aloud to my partner this morning, which I really enjoyed. One day I should read them a story that doesn't involve violence and emotional manipulation, but today is not that day.

Sunny Moraine (Lightspeed Magazine), Note to Self: in the form of an unpublished essay with marginal notes to self, concerning the 'quantum mirror'.

Up Next: The work related TBR continues to be far bigger than i can feasibly read, despite having taken a 'Reading Week' this week. Ugh.

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Some links:

Carolyn Holbrook (Australian Policy and History), Managing the Federation During a Pandemic: Spanish Influenza and COVID-19. How the premier of WA got locked out of his own state in 1919.

Amal Awad (Meanjin Winter 2020), Sage Tea, Spices and Spaces: short memoir piece on cookery and heritage.

Lisa Morrow (Meanjin Winter 2020), Unpacking home: thoughts of a displaced traveller. I see my future in this and I'm not sure I like it.

Ginger Gorman (Meanjin Winter 2020), Breaking the Compassion Drought. Two things here: when Gorman started talking about 'radical empathy' and its long history I was Extremely Me and astonished to find her sources only went back as far as the 1950s, and not to 'caritas' via medieval mysticism. Honestly. And more significantly, Gorman's Troll Hunting has been on my radar for a long time; I have thought of it as a good thing based on what I heard of it, but it is VERY hard to have confidence in her perspective about change through radical empathy in this year of 'ffs don't platform Nazis'.

Angela Smith (Meanjin Winter 2020), Shattering the neoliberal fairytale. I liked the structure of this - Smith was in Paris in January for the taxi strike - but her confidence that the initial injection of Aus govt financial support for individuals in the early COVID phase presaged a rethink of the capitalist system... oh sweet summer child.

Sophie Cunningham (Meanjin Winter 2020), If you choose to stay we may not be able to save you. Again, the ... forward-lookingness if not exactly optimism. Cunningham felt, with fire season at her back, that there was finally urgency for action on climate change. That seems to have slid off the agenda, and the people who ought to be holding both parties to account in Aus are all busy trying to hold them to account over welfare issues, Australians stranded abroad, police violence, and and and and.

Lucy Treloar (Meanjin Winter 2020), Writing the apocalypse. This essay poses a fascinating question: when will we start to see climate change in realist fiction? Treloar argues that incorporating environmental destruction and awareness thereof into realist fiction gets you shunted to the genre of 'cli-fi', but at some point that has to give way. I'm going to quote, again. It's SUCH a good essay:

Of course realist fiction, any fiction, has always depicted a curated reality: the cast of characters culled to avoid confusion, conversations condensed, action compressed, and the plot shaped around thematic or genre concerns. They present a constructed ‘seeming’ truth with a satisfying plot arc, which in the confines of the text the reader accepts as reality. In some ways novels are strong. They can hold worlds, universes, multitudes of feeling, thinking, understanding, wondering. But throw a diamond on a beach and fail to answer the question it raises and the novel’s foundations tremble. It’s not so much a loose end as a loose start. An uncanny weather event or a strange sight—a toxic algal bloom, a drowned landscape, or thousands of cuttlefish washed onto a shore—present a similar problem. Mention them and they catch the readers’ attention and threaten to pull the novel out of shape. It is the particularity of an event that presents problems. How then do you depict climate change when its effects are so variously weird?

Joanna Hershon (Guernica), Family Man. 'I never knew my uncle. But it's the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.'

Caitlin Welsh (Mashable), How online advice columns teach us to tell our own stories. Hey, I resemble that remark. Before online advice, I had Margaret Clark's 'Secret Girls Stuff' books.

Olivier Pauchard (SwissInfo), Salt: A Raw Material. This isn't an article so much as a... webbook? Idek, it doesn't work well on mobile though. This thingy, whatever it is, is an introduction to the Swiss salt industry. I have now learned there is part of the old 'Via Salina' which ran from Arc-en-Senans in France to Bern, for the transport of French Jura salt, still paved and hikeable near Yverdon Les Bains. I desire to go at once. There's also a Swiss Salt Museum, which I would go to asap if all museums weren't closed.

Kirsta A Murchison (History Today), Medieval Minims: The hidden meaning of a medieval pen-twister. Yes good.

The most exciting thing I read this week was two paragraphs I wrote this afternoon. It's been a long time since I felt this excited about my own writing, good work me. I've been working on framing my erstwhile PhD, which is not about queer people and nor is it necessarily a queer reading of... as one done with queer theory and from a queer position, and finally, by a queer person. I wrote the two scary paragraphs about I, A Known Bisexual, Have A Vested (And Vexed) Interest In The 'Men And Women: Friends?' Question today, and I feel really good about it.

Currently Reading: Oooh, too many things, as usual. Up to 10 in the goodreads list.
Fiction: Jeannie Lin's 'The Lotus Palace', which is a delight, and I would love to binge-read it, but *waves hands*.
Poetry: Further progress with Paradise Lost. FINALLY finished bk 9.
Lit Mag: Up to the Autumn Meanjin. Only three beind!
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: I'm reading, in fits and starts, Tillie Walden's graphic memoir about figure skating. It's lovely, but a physically heavy book so I don't carry it around much!
For work: Both Foucault's History of Sexuality and bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center have come off the personal-tbr and been fished around in for the book intro; I plan to keep going with both. Also working through a book on feminist theatrical revisions of classic texts, and reading a weird Canadian skiing retelling of the Canterbury Tales.

Recently Finished:

Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 by Juanita Ruys

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


For an academic review. Short version: very good at what it does, which is an analysis of the terms affectus, affectio and affection over the stated period. Not what the title suggests it is, in that it doesn't deal with *other* emotion words, least of all sensory ones.

Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature by David Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have a very odd history with this book! I think I have dipped into it for cites before, but only now read the intro properly. And more importantly, until recently I had it confused with... I don't know what book. But one published before this one. I remember being warned about *someone* over-determining homosexuality into Old English and Norse heroic masculinites, circa 2007/8 (the book may have been older than that), and when i returned to my MPhil as a now queer scholar I just assumed this must have been the book in question (which had come out in 2009). It does not do that! Nor does Frantzen, the only other logical contender - in fact if anything Frantzen UNDER-determines sexual possibilities in favour of weird noble homoerotic but not sexual bonding, something that makes much more sense now he's taken a turn toward the alt-right. Read David Clark, not Frantzen, if you are looking for early medieval homosociality.

ANYWAY. One day I will actually read all of this book cover-to-cover but for now I have read the intro and Ch1, and found them Good, Actually.

Online Fiction:

Salah Abdoh (Guernica), Exerpt from Out of Mesopotamia. Striking - fiction set in Iran during the American invasion.

P.H. Lee (Lightspeed Magazine), Ann-of-Rags. Nice creepy fairy-tale stuff. Excellent podcast.

Up Next:

Next priority, as soon as I get the book proposal off my desk, is to read down the current reads and then the work TBR. So who knows what will come up first?

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Some links:

Bellcourt, Dust and Gabriel (The New Inquiry), Top or bottom: how do we desire. This is a critical theory informed take on the 'top shortage' amongst gay men. They argue this is an abdication of responsibility for desire, and some... other things that are both foreign to me and sort of... adjacent, in a way, to my experience as a woman often read by both men and women as a prospective top. I do rather want to know if all the authors are writing AS self-proclaimed bottoms, and if so, what a top's perspective might have added.

Allison Meier (Atlas Obscura, 2013), An overstuffed taxidermied walrus comes home. On my post-pandemic list now: visit the Horniman and its too-smooth walrus.

Page Turner (own blog), What is proto-abuse. The author is kidding herself if she thinks her caveats at the end will decrease potential Drama for having talked about this relationship example, but I like the thinking-through. I like the stressed point that there are behaviours which, in and of themselves, might be either the start of an abusive pattern OR a bad day's bullshit with no trajectory.

Luke Henriques-Gomez (Guardian AU), It was life or death: the plane hijacking refugees Australia embraced. I'm annoyed I didn't know about this before! I'm also, like Henriques-Gomes, very sad we are no longer the country who welcomed those refugees.

Franki Cookney (Own blog), The gayer I get, the more I like penises: on the weird heteronormativity of, yanno, not actually being attracted to men's bodies.

Jules Gill-Peterson (The Rambling), On wanting trans women and children. This is dense, but every bit as good as Twitter said it was.

Possibly the best thing I've read in the past fortnight:

RE: Thesis defense issue (2954 words) by kalirush
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Academia, Fecklessness, Snakes, Why Did It Have To Be Snakes, Epistolary
Summary:

It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and a student needs a snake for her defense.

From: Petroski, Linda <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2020 9:40 AM
To: Kahler, Robin M. <[email protected]>
Cc: Lemieux, Annie <[email protected]>, Zhang, Wei <[email protected]>, Ortega, Richard <[email protected]>, Edelstein, Doron <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Thesis defense issue

Hello, all-

We just realized that Robin indicated that she was using a committee-provided snake for her defense, rather than one from SMO. Could you confirm that’s the plan, and who will be providing the snake if so? We’ll also need species and measurements for the files.

Thanks-

Linda

--------
Dr. Linda Petroski
Graduate Program Coordinator,
Department of Psychoceramics,
Barnett College

Strongly recommended to anyone who has dealt with grad school in any capacity.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Nothing, looks like.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Tillie Walden's graphic memoir 'Spinning', about figure skating. 'The Queer Child' is still on hiatus.
Poetry: Still working on Paradise Lost. Thought I was on book 10, but it turns out it's only book 9.
Lit Mag: Started the Winter Meanjin.
For work: 'Before Emotion', which I have out for review. 'The Fabliau in English' and 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works', intermittently. 'A New Companion to Chaucer', on hiatus / being dipped into here and there.

Recently Finished:

Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


On the good side, I really liked the protagonist of this, and the love interest: both were interesting, flawed, loveable characters who pulled me through despite... the rest being, uh, still in draft stage, it felt? Complete with some typos. Timing was off. Sudden switch between 'he'd never be interested in me' to 'let's have a fling and i'll initiate it KISS KISS' not really explained. Etc.

The supporting cast were interesting, and I wonder if the whole thing would have done better as a larger book or a duology in family-fiction / "women's fiction" or some such, with the romance thread but without depending SO MUCH on the pacing of that.

Also there's the odd fact that the sex scenes are pretty low detail but the internal monologue is wall to wall 'perving and hornt'. Just. I kind of prefer ways of conveying sexual attraction that aren't 'omigosh his abs' with 'also he's sweet and a family guy' as the decorative note?

Basically, this is a surprisingly weak book in hindsight, given how quickly and with how much enjoyment I read it.


The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends by Tom Cox

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book would have been more Of the Zeitgeist had I read it back in 2011 when Cox's work was first recommended to me. It is certainly odd to read 'humourous tales of other people's cats' in book form in this age of #catsofinstagram. But I like it - I like the links Cox draws between the human and the feline, and his anecdotes about people and various animals. I'm not sure if I'll bother with the rest of the cat man books, though, rather than jump straight to his newer stuff.


Gilded Cage by K.J. Charles

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I loved this immensely and I have no idea why it took me this long to get to it. I think it's KJ's first het romance (under this name, perhaps she's had other pen names), and it's great. Much more ... gritty than her f/f work.
Ed: I normally trust KJC but I am suspicious about indentured labour in late 19th c Aus. Hmm.


Meanjin Autumn 2020 by Jonathan Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In an extremely 2020 Mood, I started the Autumn (Aus) issue mid-year and finished it in January. But there was good stuff in here! (As usual, I ignored Shannon Burns. I read pretty much everything else in Meanjin, including things written by certain Vice-Chancellors, but I am done with Burns. Their continued publishing of his bad takes, knowing they can then run counter-takes, is... a reason I seriously reconsider my subscription every so often.)

Timmah Balls' essay Why Write was brilliant.
Jono Revanche, Age, Class, Politics: do recommend.
Liz Duck-Chong, Crosses, Flags, Arches. A history of Ronald MacDonald. Absolutely fascinating.
Anna Spargo Ryan, A Conspiracy of Witches: on abortion reform, and personal experience. Tough reading.
Dzenana Vucic, Digital Intimacy and the Aestheticisation of Sound: on ASMR media
Maxine Beneba-Clarke, On writing and risk: packs several punches, IMHO
Steve Dow, Stream Drama: a really interesting look at the impact of streaming services on Australian TV.
James Panichi, Blasphemy, Italian-Style: there's a profanity divide in Italy, and Panichi writes about it fascinatingly
Lizzie O'Shea, The Secret Misfortune of the Lucky Country: on the pokie machine industry
Megan Petrie, The Rats of the Sky: A memoir piece about travel, and pigeons
Katerina Bryant, Old Wives Tales - on superstition as cultural heritage
Matt Lewin, Please Shut the Door Quietly: a short memoir piece on being a music therapist in a palliative care ward



Short fiction online:

John Kinsella (Meanjin Autumn 2020), Here be lions. I am normally bored by the realist fiction in Meanjin, and I've definitely been bored by Kinsella before, but I like this one quite a lot.

KT Bryski (Lightspeed Magazine), The Bone Stag Walks. Good story: brilliant podcast reading.

Up Next: I haven't got anything going on my kobo at the moment, so one of my recent purchases there. Maybe Jeannie Lin's 'The Lotus Palace', which I bought at xmas.

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Some links:

Bob Nicholson (HistoryToday): Did you hear the one.... On Victorian distaste for 18thc jokes.

Eli Davies (Guardian): To solve the problem of loneliness, society needs to look belong the nuclear family.

Jonathan Smilges (CFSHRC), Bad listeners. This is... dense. I didn't find it as galvanizing as the twitter recommender did; partly perhaps I don't understand it; partly perhaps as a neurodivergent woman I don't get the same leeway *in which to be* a bad listener as Smilges, who I am assuming from their name is probably read by their bosses and some students as a man, does. I cannot, for instance, POSSIBLY imagine anything but implosion of my teaching career if I told a class to 'talk amongst yourselves' and email me questions, even if I was struggling that day.

Anya Groner, interview with Lee Connel (Electric Lit), The party upstairs and the super who has to clean it up.

Livia Gershon (JStor daily), How women lost status in saloon

Ben Moore and Edward Narayan (Conversation AU), What does a koala's nose know. Saw a picture of a koala and noticed their odd noses for the first time. Now I know about koala noses.