Strong Verbs Are Just Better

In the past two days I’ve listened to almost all of the audiobook of Felix Salmon’s The Phoenix Economy. I have some niche critiques of it - the chapter “Workspace” could really have done with the distinction between space and place which is pretty widely made in humanities circles, but which originates with human geography. Given the overlaps between geography and economics, I would have expected Salmon either to be able to deploy an accessible version in his discussion, or not explicitly state it but write in a way that means I could see the ghost of that theoretical frame. But neither are true.

In one of the later chapters, Salmon quotes someone - Keynes, I think? - who was being grilled about his proposition for massive rebuilding and revitalisation programs for every major civic centre in the UK, in the aftermath of World War Two. But where will the money come from, journalists asked? Can we afford all this? Sayeth the economist: “if we can physically do it, we can afford it.”

One of the recurring motifs of my political consciousness - at least insofar as I have kept track of economics - is the refrain that the federal budget is not a household budget, and government debt cannot be looked at the same way is individual or household debt. The link I just gave is to a Conversation article from 2014, but Australian politicians have been keen to crow about budget surpluses for my entire adult life, and hence I’ve been aware of this talking point (said, frustratedly, usually by persons further left of either major party) for much longer than a decade. The topic flared up again in 2020, too.

Lately, though, I’ve been listening to Greg Jericho’s podcast Dollars and Sense: Somewhere in there I think he made the point that there is good debt at an individual or household level, actually. Education debt: many of us have HECS debts because we believe education is worth it and/or that it will increase our later earnings (we have become much more critical of educational debt when the combination of price hikes, changes to indexing and repayment, lower-than-expected earnings and much much higher housing prices mean the educational debt is no longer resulting in net comfort for the majority of millennials).

The other line Jericho quotes a lot is Julia Gillard’s ”budgets are about choices”. We should care less about whether the current federal budget forecast that the country will be 9 billion dollars in surplus five years from now, and more about what is and isn’t funded in that. We could have made the choice on budget night - or any time before - and we still could make the choice any time now to lift jobseeker payments out of abysmal poverty (up to, say, the Henderson poverty line). That we do not is a choice.

It struck me that Jericho’s use of “Budgets are about choices” is the closest I’ve seen anyone get to pointing out that - especially when you’re in surplus, national budgets are actually quite a lot like household budgets. If I earn, say, $70,000 per year, and I have a plan to save $9,000 over five years, that sounds pretty good, right? That surplus will provide me with wiggle room for unexpected negative changes in circumstances, or be saved for the future. But if I save that $9,000 while my children are going hungry, then that is not good money management, it’s terrible priorities. (70,000 is slightly above the median individual income for Sydney. Someone with one adult income and two or three dependents would struggle to save on that income, but could probably feed and house themselves and their family.)

But if I earned $107,000 per year, and I had a plan to save $90,000 over five years - that’s house deposit money we’re talking about: as long as my hypothetical children are fed and their needs met, that’s good money management, right? Well, sure, but if I and my hypothetical children are fed and renting, but my mother or grandmother is homeless, then no, that’s not good money management, that’s terrible priorities. Now, in a household budget situation exactly WHAT I could or ought to offer my relative would depend on a great many factors, but I feel reasonably certain in saying I ought to do SOMETHING at the expense of my $90,000 five year savings plan. If instead of a household operating in the tens of thousands, I’m a nation operating in the billions… uh.

I guess I’m mostly confused that no one uses the household budget analogy to justify spending - only ever to justify NOT spending money in the national budget.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction:
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox. I might not be quite ready for a Novel About A Trans Man Literature Prof.
Maurice LeBlanc, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur (in English, via Phoebe Reads a Mystery). My hope had once been to read it in simultaneous audio and text in French, but I needed a new chores book and the English version was right there.
Non-fiction:
Lea Devun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, in fits and starts
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, also in fits and starts
Monisha Rajesh, Around the World in Eighty Trains - a good “keep in the work go-bag” choice
Felix Salmon, The Phoenix Economy - in audiobook, with about an hour left
Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue - in audiobook, and honestly I might DNF it. It’s depressing reading and not telling me anything I don’t know

Read Recently:

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me literal years to get through this, but in this last attack upon it (starting a few months ago), I loved it. The careful engagement with various aspects of women's precarity really is striking.

It also struck me, back when I FIRST started reading it, that Walter is, essentially, the male counterpart to the governess in the Turn of the Screw, or to Jane Eyre. I don't know quite what to do with that insight, but a while back I read an interesting paper on sibling performance in the work of Wilkie Collins. It stressed the general sibling-like relationship between Walter and Marian (that is, in their chosen sibling-hood, each exhibits some masculine and some feminine traits and positions toward the other). Reading Walter as, essentially, a male governess-figure both highlights how his character is not constructed as either a romantic hero or a bildungsroman protagonist - and also underlines the class commonality between him and Marian. Laura, by contrast, is Walter's love interest and Marian's foil, but very much less compelling a character.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was much less mind-bending and complex than I had been lead to expect! I liked it, but nothing about it boggled me. In fact, if I had been told it was a book about the trauma of portal travel, I would have read it before now!

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Solid Dad Book right here.

Backdated Reviews (2021-22)

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


What I learned from this book is that I do not like books or TV shows about circles of Women Existing In New York.

I gather that if you do like books about circles of Women Existing In New York it's great for that.

I have some other personal bugbears, but I shan't air them here.


Home by Stephanie Alexander

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Got an excellent recipe for "popcorn lamb" out of this.


Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I do like these BL Crime Classics. This one I thought at the time would be a bit meh - initially the characters didn't grab me - but not only did I end up enjoying the mystery plot, I find myself thinking about some of the characters off and on years later.

Short Fiction:
Addison Evans, An Itemised List of Charitable Contributions (Wyldblood Press)
Amy Barnes, On rainy nights I smell shoe leather (Scrawl Place) - the conceit / premise of this one tickled me, although I wonder if the author intended when writing that there would be an image that gave it away before you get past the first paragraph.
Shannon Savas, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Woman. I don’t know why I like this one but I do.

Recent additions to the TBR
Fiction: Brood, by Jackie Polzin, which appears to be a novel about someone raising chickens
Non-fiction: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, which appears to be a memoir about walking from the Netherlands to Constantinople

I have just finished reading, in audiobook format, Richard Glover's The Land Before Avocado, a witty and generally warm-hearted look at the cultural history of Australia in the 60s and 70s - with tentacles extending a decade or so either side.

I need to cogitate on it some more before reviewing properly, and I may need to get a library hard copy to pin down citations. One story which really stuck with me, and which was very difficult to dig up as, it turns out, the names in the newspaper report were pseudonymous: two gay men, dubbed John and Lindsay in the Age newspaper report, who were effectively sentenced to transportation to South Australia, for having freely confessed to the crime of, as it stood in 1975, buggery.

There's some details on the case in ALGA report, starting page 10. As a result of an anonymous tip-off, which they attributed to a friend jealous over one of the pair, the two were visted by police. Erroneously believing that homosexual relationships were legal behind closed doors, the two candidly described their household to police. According to the transcript of the radio interview which Glover replicates, the magistrate harrassed their lawyer throughout - but rather than a jail term, he sentenced them to move to South Australia, where homosexual relations in private WERE legal at that time.

There's so much more that I would like to know about this case than either Glover or the AGLA report tell me. For instance: did they plead guilty, or did their lawyer attempt to argue they were innocent on account of not knowing that their acts (in private) were illegal? If, as the radio show says, the magistrate harangued their lawyer, demanding to know how he could do anything but give them a jail term, what changed his mind? And why have I never heard of these blokes? Wikipedia has no info. The AGLA report is remarkably slim. Glover seems to have done his own primary source work, not drawn on eastablished gay historians (because he does cite key secondary sources). He reports that he looked for the two men in SA archives and found nothing - although perhaps that was because the names printed in the Age were pseudonyms.

Another (un)fun fact: it is still possible to be charged with buggery in the state of NSW. Because there was no specific crime for sexual assault upon another male, only different sorts of buggery and indecent acts, prior to 1984... well, that's the charge they have to use for historic offences. Some poking around on caselaw.nsw.gov.au for judgements which are part of the public record leads me to believe that many of these are now run as judge alone trials (see MacIver, sentenced by N Williams DCJ), and Anning, sentenced by S Norrish SC DCJ). Both of those I just linked to, and the severity appeal judgements in Pritchard thread a fascinating legal tightrope between the law as it was (no reference to consent), current sentencing rules (especially re minors, there are complex privisions in the Sentencing Act for historical offences against minors), and shifting community standards. I note, upon digging into these, that Pritchard included both buggery as assault upon men (over 18), AND bestiality, which really does drag out that historical muddying of the waters.

At any rate, I think judge alone trials - unless the accused is found unfit to stand trial and it goes to special hearing rather than full trial - can only happen at the request of the accused. One can see why one might opt for such a hearing, for historic cases of this sort. But goodness, it must get muddy when they adhere to their right to a jury. I would... really like to read some incisive queer legal studies work on this, but have no idea where to start looking.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction: Lara Elena Donnely, Amberlough. Sort of space-age-ish but sort of 1940s-ish detective noir. Narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal, and I'm enjoying it, but it's a genre I don't often do by audio so it's a bit odd.
Non-fiction: Marion Turner's "Chaucer: A European Life". I have learned all about the wool staple, and also that Chaucer's "littel lewys" was not living with him at the time he wrote the treatise on the Astrolabe. Nor did Chaucer see much of his wife (a courtier herself), or his daughter, at this time. It just... I dunno, adds an interesting texture to the biography that I hadn't picked up on myself.
Magazine etc: Still puttering through the Lapham's issue on Friendship. I'm also most of the way through a special issue of Post45 journal, on heteropessimism.

Recently finished:
Actually fairly recent:

The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really liked this. Is it the case that my fresh nostalgia for the wine-growing bits of Potato Europe overrides my frustration with copaganda? Possibly.

I really appreciated the narrator framing of one character's account of a past sexual assault, both for its realism (I mean, I'm not a cop, but it struck me as accurate for many authority figures: sometimes people need to talk, and you're better off calmly listening than giving a reactive response to the Tragic Content) and the way it deftly functioned as a built-in content note.


What Abigail Did That Summer : A Rivers Of London Novella by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was told I should try this if the copaganda level of the Peter POV is bugging me, and indeed, it was refreshing to see a POV that actually understands the police are not Friends. Except Abigail DOES mostly think of Peter and Nightingale as friends, or family; the tension there was nicely played out.

I really appreciated the interlace of multiple foil characters in this one. Abigail-Paul-Simon-[spoiler].


Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


0.25% of credibilty restored on account of the wry "I wouldn't just invite the police into my home, and I AM the police" line. Also, I am easily lured by historic aeroplane content.


Winter's Gifts by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well that handled several things better than NUMEROUS urban(/rural) fantasy / supernatural books I've read set in the US. I really like Kimberley's POV, especially re her religious background, and I particularly appreciated where the "vengeful(?) native spirits" plotline went.


Semi-recent, ie, this year:

This first one, I present notes from March, as I have failed to re-read:

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Insta review notes, to be fleshed out later. I used an audio book so I’ll need a library copy to properly review.

Overall: medium good to great. Many YES this, but without hard copy or e copy I haven’t taken screenshots. I like the overall structure - thematic rather than historical or regional.
Particular issues: super hisss about the use of “The Lauras”; epilogue a massive fail with police analogy and a long run of sympathy for queer police instead of articulating the difference between history as a discipline and policing as an institution. Not ENOUGH European “spiritually agender” examples, not enough poking at the PNF’s land acquisition. No non-white Xn examples i can recall although I’ll have to double check. Coverage of Hijra pretty good but too nonbinary-invested over transfemme.

DID give me a number of examples I’d never heard of including transfemme ones.

Excellent coverage of internment camp drag / theatre / gender fluidity.
Excellent nuance on Roberta Cowell.

Rating might go up to 4 when I revisit, but not down. Audiobook technically smooth, some mispronunciations.


Son of Sin by Omar Sakr

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this very much for its sheer Sydney-ness. However, what had been a tight narrative through to the protag's finishing high school just... unspooled. There was no clear plot arc OR the kind of crafted commentary arc one might expect from a memoir.

It felt like this should have been either a memoir, or cut further loose from the author's own experience. Maybe I'm in an odd position, having followed him online and read his non-fiction and poetry for some years without knowing him in person - an odd parasocial relationship from which to read barely-fiction. Some scenes stick with me months later (and facts! I did not know that urinary positions were so hotly debated among Muslim men. My key takeaway from that is that men's bathrooms should have more stalls, not just for the benefit of trans men but for the benefit of those who follow the Prophet's example in not peeing standing up). And yet I was dissatisfied with the novel overall.



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Significantly Backdated (Dec 21):

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you gave me this book sight unseen and told me I knew the author I would guess Freya wrote it. I enjoyed it and will read more, but I did come away feeling like I was going to like the author's subsequent work, once the meticulous groundwork had been done, much more. Which is probably a net win: this is a Book 1 that makes me think Book 2 will be better, not a victim of Second Book Syndrome.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Oof. I think the reason I rated this 4 and not 5 is that it felt a little repetitive after What Belongs To You. Perhaps a little too polished, as well.

Gospodar, the chapter included in the anthology Kink which occasioned so much outrage: I loved it. I remember phrases from it still, two years later. I'm not sure that it would have the same nuanced effect extracted as it does in context, however. I can't remember WHAT was in the preceding chapter, but I remember being glad, as I read the chapter in question, that I had the preceding chapter or two and indeed the previous book as context.


Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre by Elin Diamond

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Honestly surprised how much of this I remember years later. It was dry reading, full of both theory and texts I wasn't familiar with, but it grapples with a core tension that I am very interested in: when is realistic representation of women's pain Good (TM) and when is it not?



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Online Fiction:

L Chan, The Death Haiku of the Azure Five. This was very good, but I swear I only counted four haiku, and it's driving me batty.

AS Bayatt, Dolls Eyes, reprinted in Electric Lit

Azareen van der Vliet Oolomi, Adopt a cat for the global collapse, in Electric Lit

Recently Added To The TBR:

Ernest Hemmingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls. I have mostly known of Hemmingway as a laughingstock, the epitome of dudebro lit. I actually encountered something which described the plot of this book, today, and now I wish to read it.

Felicia Davin, The Scandalous Letters of V and J. Probably the opposite of Hemmingway in all ways.

Lucy Grealy, The Autobiography of a Face. Found via the same link tree that lead me to the Hemmingway, oddly enough.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning With Life. I think I saw this as a sort of disrecommendation, as a book which deals with love and sex without grappling head on with desire as a thing women actually feel. But I liked the look of the book and hence it is on my TBR now anyway.

Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and why it had it coming. A++ title there, sir.

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A few links!

Adora Svitak, How do we write about love of cock, in the aforementioned Post45 issue on heteropessimmism. Here it is! A bi woman's essay on heteropessimism and the weirdness that is being bi, being into dudes, and being surrounded by heteropessimist straight women! It's academic, rather than personal - although the bits that veer into personal, such as when she recounts reading passages from Garth Greenwell to her male lover, are Good, Actually.

Timmy Broderick, Evidence undermines rapid onset dysphoria claims. No new news here, but it is well written.

Garth Greenwell, A moral education: in praise of filth. I appreciated the nuance with which he talks about shifting ways of moralising, or de-moralising, art. I felt like several bits were grasping at something I have seen better pinned down in relation to 12th century poetry, but hey, that's standard for me.

Hannah Wang, The age of anesthesia, in the above mentioned post45 issue. In which Wang takes issue with various forms of cynical, fatalistic expression as modes of feminist "relatability", including but not limited to the heteropessimistic.

I have for some years now read, with fascination and frustration, a genre of essays (and occasional short story) which I short-hand under heteropessimism, although much of it is in fact so earnest (Sereisin's description of heteropessimism begins with Maggie Nelson's "heterosexuality always embarrasses me", requires a sort of ironic self-deprecation) that it might better be described as Sad Girl Content. It is the literature of shared (hetero) feminine abjection (in at least one prior post I called it the disappointment memoir mode).

I don't quite know what to do with this fixation, as I am no longer a usefully called a woman. The only kind of woman I find myself reflexively thinking of as akin to me is bi women, and so it continues to frustrate me that bi women are utterly absent from the communal literature of feminine (women-who-date-men) abjection.

There's a lot to commend in this recent essay by Ellie Anderson, on heteropessimism as feminist complaint. Anderson rightly takes a scalpen to Sareisin's slipshod use of "performative" to mean insincere.

Philosopher Kathryn Norlock argues that complaints may have intrinsic value even in cases when they do not aim for a transformation of circumstances in the way Ahmed describes. Norlock suggests that complaining can be recognized as valuable in itself once we take seriously the "interaffective dimension of ethical and social life." Specifically, complaint is a plea for validation that "one's pains are not insignificant," and for the company of others who recognize one's suffering as significant. Complaint has historically been disparaged by virtue of its associations with the feminine — specifically, with the feminine desire to share one's pains rather than remain an upright individual who acts in the public sphere — as in Aristotle and Kant. Norlock argues that rejecting this masculinist value system reveals that complaining is an activity that "regulates the emotional life, articulating and discerning the causes of pains, affirming the feelings of others or oneself, or inviting disclosure and commiseration." Complaining performs key functions in our collective and individual emotional lives.

This is true, and yet. Sara Ahmad, who Anderson cites extensively, would also direct us to attend to whose complaints are given space. Whose complaints are able to become a point of community, are allowed to make meaning. (Interestingly, the genre of heteropessimist complaint has several well-established women of colour in it - Christine Emba, for instance. Class, and access to the opinion essay industrial complex, seems a key factor.)

Bi women are not afforded the same authority to complain. The very structure of the complaint - that dating men flays one's dignity alive, and yet, one must, or withdraw entirely - means bisexuality is impossible. Perhaps some bi women married to men (especially, I expect, those with children) do participate in this discourse, but I can't remember the last time I read an essay grappling with the realities of heterosexual partnership/marriage from a bi perspective (maybe back in the era of feminist blogs? Perhaps these essays exist, and I'm not seeing them because of the glut of "I am an invisible queer" content from bi women; but I'd expect a good essay from a bi woman about having queer experience/identity and yet being stuck in the Crane Wife/Cat Person universe to generate HUGE amounts of biphobic discourse, the kind the "invisible queer" essays regularly attest to). The women writing the heteropessimist essays don't even seem to be aware that bi women are among them! This includes both Anderson and Sareisin (nb: Sareisin has since come out as nonbinary, but was writing as a lesbian at the time).

Sareisin rages that the heteropessimist does not meaningfully disengage from heterosexuality, Anderson argues that complaint is meaningful (but does not, I note, argue that constitues disaffiliation). Neither seem to have any sense what "disengage" or "disaffiliate" might look like. I did not get the sense, when I first read the Sareisin essay, that the author would have any time for me, a bi queer (then)woman who didn't move in lesbian circles.

Meanwhile, for a long time, I have felt that I had more in common with ostensibly straight or bi women who were single by choice or not seeking to date anymore than I did with most lesbians. Is that not also a form of disaffilation from heterosexuality? It certainly puts those women outside of many of the privileges of heterosexuality (economic, social, etc), while not actually marking them as queer unless they also display some other marked trait.

I don't have an answer. I don't even need to answer the question of which group of women I affiliate with, any more. And yet.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction:
- Omnibus of Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms books, still. Slow going but still pleasing.
- Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man, in audiobook. It is not read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, so I am sad. The voice actor DOES do a good job of "Educated German-speaker speaking English" accent, though, and it's set in wine country, and I'm sort of... whatever the opposite of homesick is. Not even homesick for Switzerland, exactly, but nostalgia-frustrated because I have some cultural context for that area of DE but didn't spend much time there. Anyway. I am soured on Peter Grant (see below), but it has been suggested that I might resent the tie-ins less. We shall see.
- I am in fact partway through the short story The Death Haiku of the Azure Five, in Clarksworld (by L Chan) and enjoying it but I keep forgetting I'm reading it and reading some piece of news or essay or something instead.
Lit Mag: I have, in the past month, been picking up and putting back down the Lapham's Quarterly "Friendship" issue. This is improvement upon not picking it up at all.
Poetry: Nil, nada
Non-fiction for personal interest:
- I am finally making headway in Marion Turner's "Chaucer: A European Life". For a bunch of reasons, it's a perfect sort of book to keep in my go-bag for on site work at my current job, and on some remote work days I have a weird amount of standby time where it is preferred that we read books rather than be on our phones. I have learned a lot about the London wool staple!
- Still pottering through Danny Lavery's "Something that may shock and discredit you" for the second time, reading aloud to my partner.

There are many more things which I am nominally reading but haven't really picked up since last post.

Recently Finished:
Actually Recent:
Archer: the First Nations Issue by Maddee Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me a damn long time, but I finally finished this.

Two stand-out essays:

Q&A with SJ Norman

Anonymous: Pronoun Trouble

Neither makes me comfortable, and maybe I'll talk somewhere else one day about what in them hit home and what hit a nerve. Not on Goodreads, I think.




Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Things this was:
- a fun historical romp through periods and subjects largely outside my prior interests (except for Lord Byron, bless his weird over-dramatic socks)
- a MASTERCLASS in accessible citation. I listened in audio, and I had no idea there *were* footnotes at all, because Jenner weaves "as the such-and-such scholars say" in so well.
- a MASTERCLASS in breaking down theoretical concepts, see above

I also keep thinking about the section on celebrity photographs and early photographic manipulation. One actress, whose name I forget (and I can't check because I don't have hard copy) sued over manipulated images of her face over risqué nudes, and lost. I keep thinking about this in context of the current SAG strike, and AI, and being confused that no one is pitching hot take essays about the connection.



Semi-recent, IE, this year:
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved the opening, framing, premise, and most of the execution of this. I enjoy the podcast, and I *particularly* appreciated the way that chapters of this sewed together what had been 2 or sometimes 3 podcast episodes to produce a chapter which had a sort of... preview and a chunky case study (Bosey and Roger Casement were a great combo).

However, I have two complaints:

1. the conclusion was MEH. It did not say anything the introduction didn't say and it said it more boringly. Perhaps this is a product of the public history style? But I have definitely read pop history which doesn't do that (see: Greg Jenner's Dead Famous).

2. The final chapter, which sewed together Andrew Sullivan and Pym Fortuyn, with a contextual segue through the AIDS crisis, was a HOT MESS. It gave no specific contextual attention to AIDS or gay public health in general on the continent, aside from one note that Amsterdam had dealt pretty well because of pre-existing good links between gay community and health services over a hepatitis outbreak. In general, it was written as if the US's approach to AIDS was paradigmatic for the world, which it just wasn't. Australia in general, and Sydney specifically, was a lot closer to Amsterdam (perhaps because of better responses to earlier outbreaks? I don't know and my epidemiology history insiders are only confident to speak on AIDS>COVID trajectories). There's a lot that Pim Fortuyn and centrist-to-right US gays have in common, of course, but you can't just take New York's AIDS history and treat it as standard for the developed world. And the authors should BOTH KNOW BETTER and also have the resources to do better, because one is English and one is an American working for the Gay Museum in Berlin!

I am still, however, very much on board with their project of "bad gay" history: the history, specifically, of how "reclaiming" gay figures from the past has fed into dubious contemporary politics. Something I feel the trans community should think more carefully about before going all in on reclamatory and redemptive premodern narratives, but I appear to be rowing my boat upstream on that count.



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Girlhood by Melissa Febos

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a difficult and important read. I marked it to-read back when I was madly collecting books about the trauma of being Assigned Girl, hoping that reading enough feminist rage and trauma would anchor me in my assigned gender. By the time I got around to reading it, that was a lost cause.

This was very much a book about early (peri-pubsecent) sexualisation, and the project of reclaiming one's sexuality from a barrage of constant sexual predation. I was about to say that "although I was in an abusive relationship, Febos' experience is wildly different to mine", but it... isn't, not entirely. The age parameters, now that I think about it, are oddly similar, but the frequency and (forgive the legalese) severity, and above all the impact upon me, are widly different. I can't even put that latter down to gender, because I know many trans men whose lives and indeed adult selves walk much closer to Febos than to me.

I spent most of this book ping-ponging between "yoewch, to accurate", and "... wtf i thought this sort of thing was mostly a scare story they told you in school health class". Much like how I offhandedly said to a friend a while back "everyone knows Go Ask Alice was a hoax, that's not how peer pressure ACTUALLY works" and the friend went... "well i read it and it seemed pretty close to my experience. I'd call it plagiarism rather than a hoax." (the author of Go Ask Alice, in case you didn't know, was a conservative therapist working with young women).

Things I particularly resonated with:
- Febos' description of how her parents were not at all prepared to either help or protect her from what was going on. Same, except wildly different. Mine, for instance, were not equipped to help a kid who didn't experience sexuality as just... a natural thing that happens. Who might need to THINK, read, compare, consider, etc. I don't think they'd have coped better with Febos per se, but they were running on a script for a normative daughter halfway between us.
- The chapter about the cuddle party, and feeling obliged to offer affection/consolation to the Sad Man. I particularly appreciated that Febos gave equal weight to discomfort with the attentions of an Enthusiastic Woman And Her Male Partner, because were it about Sad Man alone... I'd be thinking of all the weird physical dynamics which come up with people OTHER than the Sad Straight Man.

Things I didn't but which were elucidatory: I won't go into all of them. But even though I've ditched my project work on Chaucer, I retain my fascination with Kim Zarins' "Sometimes We Tell The Truth". Her WOB's prologue gave me instant "erk". Like... okay, I get where you're going here but this feels wrong, it feels like a story they tell in health class not... a thing that actually happens. (A friend who HAD been subj to advances from older men at age 12 thought I meant I didn't think anyone was. No, I get that... happens... but something about the narration felt like an /extrapolation/ of how that might happen rather than either actually how it happens or how the young girl in q might re-tool the story later) On first read of Febos I didn't make the connection. On second read... the way Febos characterises her younger self feels like the kind of narration Zarins' WOB didn't hit; but Zaris' 17 y old Alison doesn't sound as far removed from Febos' 12 y old self as I thought. If that makes sense? Of course adult Febos isn't trying to paper over her wounds: her whole brand is Trauma Writing. But if she did... maybe it might come out closer to Zarins' Alison than I initially thought.



All About Yves: Notes from a transition by Yves Rees

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proper review coming but:
1. Rounded up by reason if “I like to read about people like me”.
2. However, I’m pretty sure I’d rather hear from Yves 2025 than Yves “I could never use a men’s bathroom” 2021. There’s a lot that’s gauche here, and ffs. Your trad pub memoir doesn’t count for “publish or perish”. The academic audience might not be here in 2025 but the queers will.

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23.07.23 Note from later me: I read this as audiobook, I don't have a hard copy, and I'm really not up to re-considering the Saga of Nonbinary Academic right now. Maybe another year. Maybe another decade. This memoir was immensely important to me but didn't review it at the time and I cannot now.



Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


THAT WAS BOTH VALIDATING (yes, i guessed who nona was) and NOT WHAT I EXPECTED AT ALL. A+, ROUND OF APPLAUSE.

...

HOWEVER I would like to register a growing sense of wtf re the charactisation of the genocidal apocalypticist as Maori? It became really explicit in this book and ... no? Love the kiwi localisation, but... Uh. Weirdly I have seen no pushback, and I am not committed enough to this book or genre, nor informed enough about the NZ context specifically.

I note my discomfort, I hope it doesn't snowball, and in the meantime I will do as I have resolved to do instead of pontificating about Books I Read For Fun: bump something else up the tbr. In this case, Alexis Wright's The Swan Book.



Bonus: One(1) Deep Backdated Review. The next in queue is Manion's "Female Husbands", and I do not have the werewithal. But I promised a trans woman pal I'd dig out the applicable-to-her-interests bits, so I might re-read it soonish and then it can go into the recent queue again. Instead:

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am really souring on these books, which I don't think is necessarily a flaw in Aaronovitch's work so much as my increasing distaste for the built in copaganda of much crime fiction. I remain UGH that Peter has not left the Met.



Online Fiction: two recent two backdated
Recent:
- Kehkashan Khalid, The Petticoat Government (Fantasy Magazine). Set in something approximating Mughal India, I think? It actually provided a fleshed-out sense of how female regnancy could work in highly spatially segregated societies, something I *technically know* with my research into gendered space in high and late medieval Europe, but haven't got a really graspable characterised handle on.
- L Chan, Re/union (Clarkesworld). One daughter, of several siblings, is the only remaining family member observing the pious New Year rituals with the ancestors: who are now, for both better and worse, represented by AI simulations at a banquet table. I don't have the cultural context for this and yet it both gripped and gutted me in places.

Backdated
- Rob E Boley, The Assembly of Graves (Diabolical Plots). Sometimes, I read depictions of lesbian relationships, written by (apparently cis and straight, although frequently one only assumes that because Queer Authors have their ID front and foremost) Men, which seem incredibly realistic and Relatable (TM) to me. It is possible this is a sign of my Gender (TM), given I frequently have the opposite relationship with Lesbian Fictions (TM). I dunno. I do know this is a neat horror story and I did not predict the twists to it even though perhaps I should have.
- Cheri Kamei, Blood in the Thread (Tor dot com). This is, I think, a pretty good story in its own right. Nevertheless. I said; I have said over and over and I'm sure more often than that but in keywords I can't recall to fling at site search; that I wanted a queer take on the Cat Person/Crane Wife problem. This is not what I wanted. If I wanted the abjection of the More Queer (butchness optional) partner faced with a Femme and/or Bi partner I could consume anything from The Well of Loneliness to Rent. And yet. I don't think this is a BAD short story, just. One I'm inclined to be bristly at.

Recently Added To The TBR:
Fiction:
- Alis Hawkins, "A Bitter Remedy", from a series called The Oxford Mysteries. KJ Charles gave it a mixed review but I think I like the things she likes and the things she dislikes in this one would be balanced out by my love of weirdly specific academic history.
- Patrick DeWitt, "The Librarianist". Got the rec from the twitter account "Caustic Cover Critic", who is one of my few sources of non-gay capital L Literary recommendations.
- Bruce Pascoe, "Salt: Selected Stories and Essays". I've had Dark Emu on my kobo for ages, but first burnout happened and now my work reading needs to be hard copy. I am intruiged by the idea of mixing fiction and essay, and have earmarked this as a possible library read, esp when I run out of work-appropriate things from my already owned hard copy pile.
- Se-hee Baek, "I want to die but I want to eat Tteokbokki". I saw a really strong rec for this as a depiction of Depression Et Al, and hey, I've never read Korean fiction before.

---

Some links: past and present:

Past: The dates on these are mid 2021, and hoo boy, let me tell you, scrolling back two years in my pinboard is, quite literally, scrolling back two years in terms of gender dysphoria and career anxiety. Still. Some stuff that, now that I look at it again, stuck with me!

- Isabelle O'Carrol (Refinery29), ADHD and gaslighting in women. TLDR neurodivergent women (people? I suspect people) more vulnerable to manipulation.
- Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future. I get a lot of reading recs from SE Smith on Twitter and I think this is one of them.
- Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. By now, in 2023, most of the Long Covid content i see online (perhaps due to Twitter algorithm) is outright misinformation, albeit often driven by understandable trauma and self-protection. I believe I was already noticing this trend by 2021, and this particular article did not trip that alarm. I'm interested in MAST cell activation syndrome, in and of itself, because friends have it and I suspect at least one relative does, and also it's weird and I am interested in weird things.
- Paige Turner (own blog), The healing process can be traumatic. I got bored of Paige's blog within six months of this post, but this one remains both short and true.

Recent: Other than ones linked earlier in this post, I give you the following:
- The Carapan gallery of Mexican art (own blog), What is an Alebrije: TL;DR man has hallucinations in the 1930s, makes art, accidentally sets off a folk art tradition.
- JP Brammer (own blog), Food Fight: on "ethnic" food and percieved authenticity. I love many things Brammer writes and this is a fine example.
- Chelsea Watego (Indigenous X), Voice To Parliament: Why Mob Are Staying Silent.
- Joseph Earp (Guardian), My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write then he plagiarised my work. Supplementary to, and bafflingly uncited in, the next link;
- Anna Verney and Richard Cooke, Being John Hughes (The Monthly). I was fascinated and apalled and at times discomfortingly empathetic to Hughes. I, too, was a kid from the periphery of the Hunter Region, said to be brilliant and promising. But I didn't go to Newcastle for uni, and I was not said to be the Next Big Thing (even at school: partly gender, but lbr the only Next Big Things my school at large was interested in was next big evangelist, and so my male peers as scholarly high achievers were in fact less lauded than I, at least I had the humanities teaching lead on my side). I too went abroad for a PhD and came home less than I had hoped to be. But I came home crippled by all the things I could not speak to, while Johnny Boy seems to have come home and determined to... speak to everything, by plagiarism if he can get away with it. (The worst is his remixing of the Bringing Them Home report's accounts, but he also felt the need to plagiarise a relatively privileged male student? Why?? Baffling.)

It's been over nine months since I made a reading post, although I did do a 2022 round-up. This is a pity, since I had some Opinions about some of the things I read in Dec 2021 and Jan 2022. But here we are. Perhaps I will make some bonus reviews in the coming months, as well as catching up with 2023 so far.

You can find my online recs at @ [email protected], if that's of interest to you.

As surprises no one, I've been reading a lot of trans history. I really recommend the ABC radio two-parter Crossing Time: Australia's Transgender History, which they put out for World Pride. In particular, I was fascinated by Robin Eames' discussion of Edward de Lacy Evans, a trans man who seems to have lived happily and securely with his wife until exposed by a man Eames describes as his brother-in-law - and elsewhere as the father of de Lacy Evans' wife. I checked up, it's the WIFE's brother-in-law who is implicated in both of these things.

What Eames points out, in that interview, and this piece for The Conversation, is that *we only find out* about these trans people (mostly men) when something goes wrong, usually a personal grudge, bringing them to the attention of the law or the asylum. Broadly, this matches the pattern which Jen Manion traces in European and American transmasc legal records (as opposed to military figures or published adventures of afab sailors): a surprising degree of social security, especially through marriage and/or secure businessmanship; mobility (eg through sales careers) facilitating new starts; and a tendency to be judged by at least some community members on the standards of the gender-roles the individual performed (pub landlord, husband, flirtatious sailor, etc).

The general tendency among historians seems to be that trans women were not afforded these same securities in the past. Jules Gil-Petersen points out that when we start to see trans women emerging in the American legal record it is as marginalised urbanites, performing insecure gendered labour (this is covered in her recent post towards a trans history of abortion) like sex work, bar service and dancing.

Separately, I've been talking with a trans femme friend about historical transness, and my friend's perplexity over how someone like Eleanor Rykener *seems to have passed*, for most purposes, and only come to legal attention *because* of her sex work. Photographs of Magnus Hirschfield's clients look, in contemporary transfemme parlance "bricky", but also, in the historical photographic context, much like a lot of other 1920s women! I've been watching historical costuming TikTok, and *so much* of the premodern feminine silhoutte, whatever it may be at the time, is achieved by building out, not (except in very high society) cinching in. Even regency gowns had underlayers, although I'm sure that it was much easier in Victorian or early modern England to "pass" with a testosterone-dominant body. One of Manion's arguments about transmasc figures is that clothes very much maketh the man: few seem to want to make the corrolorary argument that clothes might effectively make the woman, in at least some contexts.

Fanny and Stella were living the high life, cross-dressing for fun as well as sex, and it was their *blurring* of those lines which brought them to the attention of the law.

Meanwhile, returning to the trans men Eames cites, and some of Manion's examples: it is often the wife's family or an ex-husband who brought the trans husband to the attention of the law or the psychiatric authority. It seems safe to conclude then that some men might have successfully passed by remaining unmarried, or by marrying widows with no relations to interfere. Jules Gil-Petersen, talking about the economic marginalisation of trans women, points out that they were not only excluded from the employment market upon transition, but also from the marriage market: but ... is that true?

We completely take it for granted that women happily married trans men, drawing as we do on previous lesbian readings of similar relationships. Why assume no men would marry trans women prior to the age of medical transition? Queer men exist, and might have good family reasons to need to be married. Might such a man be in a better position to shield his wife from family interference than the wives of trans men were? Granted, if none of those cases *at all* came to public light, then they must at the very least have been less common than the trans husband variation. But I also note that Manion argues strongly for mobility *away* from cities to small towns enabling security for trans men: has anyone been looking in small town archives for trans women? Jules Gil-Peterson has a book forthcoming offering a long history of transmisogyny: if she's done both urban and countryside archive research, and found only urban evidence, I'm hoping she spells out where she looked and didn't find anything as well as where she did.

Ed: it occurs to me the day after writing this out that a key difference between trans m / cis f marriages and cis m / trans f is, of course, the position of power afforded by being the husband. In many of Manion's examples, the women claim not to have known their husband's assigned sex: it's certainly plausible although any individual case might be bluffing. Hence, the cis woman has a way out which doesn't completely lose face. The hypothetical cis man marrying a stealth trans woman, however, does not have that: as husband, he's not able to say "uh, well, my spouse seemed weird about undressing and avoids sex, but she did say she was ill..." He has no way of exposing her without exposing himself, except for routes dangerous to the trans woman: abandonment (she can't come after him without exposing herself), or even murder. Hence, no legal records. This would also mean that where some of the transmasc husbands probably *did* marry their wives without giving her full prior knowledge, hoping that either she had figured it out, loved him enough to accept it, or would maintain the relationship anyway out of fear of reputational loss - the hypothetical trans woman *doesn't* have that option, or would almost never (exceptions would be: marrying a man known to be impotent or an invalid; an agreed-upon lavender marriage wherein she did not specify what made her different to other women and undesirous of sex). I still think that lavender marriage with a queer man, and perhaps marriage to a widower (no expectation of children), would be plausible, but the hypothetical trans woman has far fewer cards to play than the trans husband.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction: The omnibus of Mercedes Lackey's "The Mage Storms" trilogy. I just started it and it's really... nice, just nice to be reading epic but soft fantasy again.
Non-fiction:

Greg Jenner's "Dead Famous", in audiobook. It's fun, good background noise while doing chores and such. I love his sense of humour; and he's ALSO a masterclass in giving citations without using footnotes. I am never at sea listening to the audio: he cites key primary sources, major scholars, and even entire theoretical debates (Bhaktin came up at some point!) in fantastically accessible prose. If I were still teaching I'd get the hard copy and take photographs, particularly of the bit which did a run-down of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to relationships between individuals and media representation, as an example for student writing: how to paraphrase for analytical use (rather than merely summarise), evalate and contextualise in natural-sounding sentences.

I also got a couple of chapters in to Shon Faye's The Transgender Issue, it's very good but also... kinda grim, and very contemporary-politics rather than exploratory or historical or any of the other interesting angles which keep me going through grim content.

Poetry: Nothing atm
Lit Mag: I got about 1/3 of the way into the Laphams Quarterly issue on Friendship, but it's somewhere in my boxes now. Instead, I finally started the Summer 2019/2020 issue of Archer, an Indigenous guest-edited issue. Here, have a quote from an interview with SJ Norman, by editor Maddee Clark:

I feel the Mob are generally socialised to understand ourselves as part of a lineage and in intergenerational relationship. Not in some dynastic way! I know that I am the futuredream of my ancestors, that in fact they are dreaming me right now, and I find tremendous strength in that.
White folks like to think they are always the first to do something, though, and that erasure is one of the more toxic hang-ups of settler colonialism and of capitalism. People suffer because of it, communities suffer because of it.
If some of the younger queer and trans artists that I know had half a clue of the rich, powerful artistic and cultural lineages they belong to, and were prepared to embrace the Elders [nb: source capitalisation] that are available to them in their imediate communities, maybe they would not feel as alone as a lot of them appear to. Maybe they wouldn't be reproducing violence and exclusion to such an extent.
This is a syndrome that Melbourne in particular really suffers from. Sydney is a very different context where people are held in a strong weave of intergenerational support and accountability.

I liked that, partly because I've been thinking about the differences between Melbourne and Sydney lately - how Melbourne has both the radical left and the stronger neo-nazi presence (and more academic terfs, too), whereas Sydney has a really strong strain of religious conservatism. Protestant, Catholic - even Islamic, tbh, no other city in Australia has made global headlines with the sheikh of its largest mosque comparing women to unattended meat. I've been trying to find the flip side of that, like the radical left and the neo-nazis go together (apparently Basel is the Melbourne of Switzerland in this respect, as well as in the cool riverside dining options sense). If this description is accurate, perhaps that might be it? I wonder. I wonder what Norman bases this on.

There are other things which intruigue me about this - when is white queer engagement with our "lineage" renewal, remedying our lack, and when is it unwarranted taking up space. Sandy O'Sullivan, who is interviewed in the ABC post I linked above, was twitter tagged in some reviews/recs of it which enthused about the Edward de Lacy Evans story, and probably some others I didn't see; O'Sullivan became wildly frustrated with the enthusiasm of white queers for white queer history. (I became frustrated with the program editing: I know Sandy HAS archival examples to discuss, but all that remained in was the macro level theoretical discussion about what Sandy calls "the colonial project of gender", which is very important but not a good neat oh hey I learned a thing lemme tell you in two tweets kind of rec-highlight.) I don't know. I don't have a solution here. I'm a goddamn medievalist, I'm the opposite of a solution. (I am, at least, no longer employed to generate more European lit canon content... Which, if I generate it anyway for fun, is possibly worse.)

Recently (well, this year) Finished:

The Correct Order of Biscuits: And Other Meticulously Assembled Lists of Extremely Valuable Nonsense by Adam Sharp

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is difficult to explain why I paid for an audiobook of what is, basically, tweet threads. But I did and I enjoyed it. Good background noise. Whole book elevated by the fact that the "About the author" is given in lists as well.


The Brexit Tapes by John Bull

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another book of tweet threads: co-incidental, I promise, I started The Correct Order of Biscuits long before this one and just finished them close together.

This is funny. This is a poorly proof-read self-pub (speaker tags swap between first and last names, formatting issues with the footnotes). This is also an archive of popular tweet threads, which really needed a developmental editor to turn it into a workable book. Given it came out well after the events, it needed some re-structuring to give it a through-plot, and also knowing later developments in britpol, limiting it to a single PM doesn't... work.

The conceit of being historical archives though is FANTASTICALLY well done, no cringe about it at all, absolutely doubled down on every humourous aspect. Ergo I did enjoy it.


Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was completely acceptable aeroplane audiobook content. As a novel, though, it left something to be desired, I think because I'm not into DnD. I'm familiar, but not INTO it. It felt like reading fanfiction for a fandom I'm not in - except the romance plot, while still a dominant plot, was much too chill for me to get into cross-fandom reading. It... uh... I think it relies on you having certain assumptions about what an orc is like, what this or that character type is like, that I just don't have due to not playing DnD. So I didn't viscerally appreciate the subversions, even when I knew they were there, and I noticed how thin the character work actaully was.

Compare to T Kingfisher's White Rat books, where I can see the DnD worldbuilding but the storytelling and the characters hold up even if you don't care about that.


Dracula by Bram Stoker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This took me almost a year to finish, in the "Phoebe Reads a Mystery" audio read. I started it having not long finished The Turn of the Screw, and tried to keep up with "Dracula Daily", but the book is not chronological and I liked that structure better than the Dracular Daily structure. Then life happened, got distracted, etc. But: I did enjoy it, my genre knowledge is much enhanced, and Weird Professor van Helsing is my weird, weird fave.


And also - not putting a goodreads review in, but I finished The Return of the King (having been working away at the entire trilogy since August) in the Andy Serkis audiobook. Loved it. Loved Andy Serkis' narration: for the most part, and especially with Gollum, it's a distinct read, not a reprise of the movies. But there were bits - the tune to The Road Goes Ever On And On; certain lines from other characters (in ROTK, it was Theoden's speech before battle) where he echoed the intonation, without imitating their voices. Perfect. Loved it.

One (1) Bonus Backdated Review (Nov 2021, apparently):
The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Belated, but: yes! Good! I liked this, I will read the next one. I particularly liked the plot involving an attraction *not* pursued - felt very historically grounded, and added depth and complexity to Perveen's character.

Some Online Fiction: These I will... eh, let's say two recent two backdated?
Recent:

Jonathan Louis Duckworth (Diabolical Plots): 21 Motes. Forget androids and their electronic sheep: do AI enchanced appliances feel love?

Amal Singh (Diabolical Plots): Tell me the meaning of bees. At first I thought this was an allegory for climate change, and then for dementia. I suspect it is not an allegory at all, but it is deeply resonant and I recommend it.

Backdated:

Megan Arkenberg (Nightmare Magazine): The Crowgirl. I do not normally read horror, let alone zombie fiction, but I was on a big Arkenberg kick in December 2021 (I recall distinctly: I listened to this one between the bus arrival in a small Swiss town and the cat boarding place opening so I could pick Mercury up, as I walked a loop around the village). I loved this.

Rachel K Jones (Uncanny Magazine), Six Fictions about Unicorns. Also recommended, although I don't have the same visceral memory of exactly where I was and when and how much I loved this one.

Recently Added To the TBR:
Fiction: Most recent addition is "Beyond Human: Tales of the New Us", an anthology through Lower Decks Press, I believe because one of y'all on here is in it.
Non-fiction: The two most recent additions are "The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Horrors, Ending State Violence" by Judith Levine, and "The Goldfish in the Parlour" (a book on Victorian human-animal relationships) by John Simmons. The Duality of Reader, etc.
The list still marked "academic": Most recent appears to be Nancy Armstrong's "How Novels Think".
Poetry: Paisley Rekdal's "Nightingale". I follow Rekdal on Twitter, I know she does Ovid adaptations, but hadn't added this to my tbr until recently.

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*bows, flourishes*

This has been What Are You Reading Almost On A Wednesday, first time since June 2022, please clap.

Tonight, despite not having been very functional today, I diced up some wizened peaches and a going-mushy pear and caramelised them, and ate them with caramel ice cream. Good choices: made.

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Camilla Domonoske (NPR), When "Miss" meant so much more. June 1963, Mary Hamilton, a Black civil rights activist, refuses to answer a judge's questions until addressed as Miss Hamilton. She was a close friend of Sheila Michaels, an early adopter/agitator for "Ms".

Liam Mannix (SMH, July 2021), Worried about astrazeneca? Me too. The way we think about risk might be the problem.. Late enough that this is no longer a hot button issue, but with that past, I want to praise this article as a really sterling example of good scicomm.

Liz Brown (Slate), Hollywood has long abused conservatorships. I spent the past decade studying one of the darkest cases.. On Harrison Post, a wealthy gay man in 1930s Hollywood, placed under guardianship by his family.

Alex Tarney (SBS), I could breathe again: bisexual couple on finding acceptance in Australia. Nothing startling here, except that it's unusual to find articles on bi erasure / mental health (the bulk of the concern of this article) which deal with couples where *both* partners are bi. Let alone apparently-heterosexual couples. Let alone both immigrants. Etc.

Idil Gallip (Gal-Dem), Long before weighted blankets, there were Turkish yorgans.

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley (Atlantic), Disinfected mail tells a story about past pandemics. In which we learn the Disinfected Mail Study Circle exists.

Ruth Graham (NYT), Among Mormon women: frank talk about sacred underclothes.

Yuri Veytskin et al (Soccer Politics Blog), The Soccer War: armed conflict between Honduras and San Salvador, 1969.

Virgina Berridge (History Workshop), History does have something to say. Berridge is an AIDs historian; at the time this came it I was seeing a lot of calls NOT to compare COVID to AIDs, for reasons sometimes valid (rarely an the basis of transmission vectors, the actual best reason to limit comparisons), sometimes bafflnig. I enjoyed this piece in counter to that.

Bodie A. Ashton (De Grutyer Conversations), Coming home and coming out: Germany, Euro2020, and the battle for queer rights. I would not normally have read this, but I am a big Bodie Ashton fan. It did not disappoint.

Tom Cox's Obit for Ralph, a very good cat.

Jarrett Walker (own blog), The dangers of elite projection. This is from a transit politics blog. Its ultimate argument is for more buses as the lowest-common-denominator most efficient public transport investment, but the whole concept of "elite projection" is worth your time. And mine, indeed.

Jarrett Walker (own blog), Streetcars: an inconvenient truth. Difficult for my tram-loving soul to face, but reasonably convincing.

Cee Frances (The Lifted Brow), On queer grieving: the community crisis of vicarious trauma. This is an exerpt from "Going Postal: Beyond Yes or No", a collection of essays about the Aus marriage survey. On account of just this vicarious trauma, I have no intention of purchasing or reading that collection. But this was a good essay.

John McWhorter (The Atlantic), How "White Fragility" talks down to Black People. I'd seen a lot of passing critiques of DiAngelo, and finally knuckled down to read a deeper one. [ED: Only after recieving comments have I remembered what was specific about this one: the author is something of a centrist. My thoughts are less i-cosign-all-this, more, if the book annoys a Black centrist, ie, conservative in terms of Black stances in the US, AND the many radical-leftists I usually get takes from... I can deprioritise it on my "ought to read" list.]

Hala Iqbal (Vox), How the CIA's fake Hepatitis B vaccine program in Pakistan helped fuel vaccine distrust.

This has been: some links, literally a year after I read them.

I do not have capacity to update my Goodreads rn. Haven't since December. The task gets Worse by week.

What I am currently reading:
- the poems and essays for the next 3 weeks of teaching
- More about John Donne than I'd planned, for same
- the 2021 anthology "Nonbinary Lives" ed Meg-John Barker et al.
- Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon "Gender Failure"
- re-read of Monstrous Regiment
- The Play issue of Archer mag
- a bunch of other stuff on hiatus

Why YES there's at theme there why do you ask.

---

Some much belated but interesting links:

Kirby Conrod (own blog), So you're ABD and you're beginning to suspect you have undiagnosed ADHD

Alexis Nowicki (Slate), "Cat Person" by Kristin Roupenian drew specific details from my life. This pales in comparison to the later Bad Art Friend debacle, but what's fascinating is that I HATED Cat Person and I found Nowicki's account of her actual experience much more compelling.

Ange Mlinko (LRB), Waiting for the Poetry, on Adrienne Rich.

Huw Lemmy (own blog), Meanlingless Sex. Has some great stuff on queer storytelling.

Aviva Stahl (New Inquiry), Trust in Instinct. I've still not read Conflict Is Not Abuse, but between observing the kind of people who evangelise that book, and this (and a few twitter threads) response, I am no longer interested in doing so. As well as a response to Schulmann, this has some interesting things to say about harm and shame.

Joe Pinkser (The Atlantic), School Days start and end too early

Lincoln Michael (own blog), Art should be a doorway, not a mirror. Response to the Isabell Fall fall-out, but insightful in its own right.

Christina Tesoro (The Toast), "Not So Bad": On Consent, Non-Consent, and Trauma.

Benjamin Riley (Overland), How To Come Out At The End of Queer Community. Aside from talking queer community dynamics at large, this one might be of interest to those of you who are churchgoers or involved in other religious communities - it's got a chunk talking about how MCC (Sydney's Officially Gay Church) is now attracting more "unchurched" young people than gay Xns.

Da'Shaun Harrison (own blog), Committing harm is not the same as being abusive.

Rafael Tonon (Gastro Obscura), The team resurrecting Ancient Rome's favourite condiment

Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future

Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark.org), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. Might be out of date by now.

Kirsten Leng (Notches blog), Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany 1900-1933.

Cathy Free (WaPo), Three women dumped their cheating boyfriend and went on a road trip together

Maclean's magazine (CA) 1962, How to tell the Grits from the Tories. This is marked fiction but I suspect a metadata error. It reads like moderate political satire.

Matthew Sherril (Outside Online), The ghost trail hunters of Mount Desert Island

Kyl Myers (Archer Magazine), Gender socialisation: rethinking our inherited structures. I know there's a lot of pushback at the moment to the concept of "socialisation" because somehow it's taken that if
[transmasc / cfab / tmab / whatever term we're using to catch both trans men and enbies who were assigned-and-parented-and-may-have-continued-on-assumed-female today] talk about being socialised female/girl it must be the case that trans women and trans femmes were (assumed: successfully) socialised male/man. This... does not seem to me to be at all obvious! I have no idea why everyone assumes there must be polarity at all times! (When trans women assert they in fact internalised harmful female socialisation, eg, that femininity requires subservience, they do not usually imply that trans men 1:1 picked up the corresponding male socialisation and privileges?? I don't think??) Here endeth my necessary disclaimer for this link.

Craig Robertson (Places Journal), The filing cabinet and 20th century information infrastructure. This was, no joke, one of the best things I read last year.

Saved as far back as June, I think...

Sophia Siddiqui (Institute of Race Relations), Feminism, Biological Fundamentalism, and the attack on trans rights. As well as covering the incompatability of transphobia with feminism, it does a solid job of walking through the links between white supremacy and transphobia in far-right movements across Europe.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (The Hedgehog Review), Straightness Studies: Who do we think we are?. The premise of this piece is catnip to me - I read a lot of interrogations of 'heteropessmism' around this time - but the execution disappointed and enraged me. Some parts were extremely perspicacious! (eg: If you’ve only ever experienced heterosexuality as an imposition, a request out of step with your wiring or politics or however you understand it, you may be inclined to imagine that everyone experiences it as stifling. Indeed, scholars of straightness overemphasize the aspects of heterosexuality that involve people acting against their true (queer) desires and underemphasize the part where men and women fall in love with each other or jump eagerly into bed. If the aim is to shed light on straightness itself, the bafflement of nonstraight onlookers can only go so far.) And yet much of the article seems to be devoted to trying to be... a straight Bindel? Poking fun at newfangled genders and sexualities, AND at lesbians who think straight women are 'boring'. Also, did not appear to consider that not all 'nonstraight' women onlookers are unattracted to men. Like. If her argument holds up, the ideal position from which to analyse (women's) straightness is that of a bi woman. This does not appear to have occured to her.

David (own substack), Good Advice, Bad Gay: On dyke bed death. I just really like how David writes about a lot of things.

David (own substack), David Davis 28 part 1: on cringe and David Davis 28 part 2: on ruined orgasms. The first is about Fifty Shades and responses to; the second works through Simone Ngai's theory of the gimmick, which I found difficult to process but intriguing.

Claire Potter (own substack), A History of the 1980s Sex Wars You Don't Know. Inteview with Lorna N. Bracewell, who identifies four, rather than two, sides to the sex wars.

Aminatta Forna (LitHub), Chasing a waking life: on the pains of being an insomniac. What it says on the tin.

Frank Bongiorno (Inside Story), On the preservation of pure learning. Despite the poncy title, a vr good incisive essay on the state of Australian higher ed in 2021.

Katelyn Burns (Medium), 'Trans widows' aren't trapped in loveless marriages. There was a spate of horrible, mostly UK-centred, discourse about 'trans widows', ie, cis women still married to trans women, who will often refuse to grant them either a divorce or spousal approval for a GIC. I was consistently baffled about how they claimed to be 'trapped', when absolutely none of them reported that their spouse was blocking access to divorce (in the UK you have to have mutal agreement to a no-fault divorce, at least for... five? ten? years). You can just get divorced! It's that easy!

Luke Pearson (NITV), What is a continuous culture, and are aboriginal cultures the oldest?. I really liked this, very incisive. The term ‘continuous culture’ should be a source of pride, but it is also a concept that needs to be unpacked. Viewed through the wrong lens it can also be seen to suggest that because we had a ‘continuous culture’ for over 60,000 years that there were no changes, no adaptations, no innovations, and was not influenced by individuals of great talent and skill. Aboriginal cultures in Australia maintained certain consistencies, but we also know that it survived through significant periods of change and needed to be able to grow and to adapt to survive and thrive in these changing environments.

James Shackell (Guardian Aus), Most of Australia's literary heritage is out of print. A project called Untapped is working to rectify this via e-books.

Daniel Davies (Avidly), The social life of the Riverside Chaucer. We had a round of this conversation about our copies of the Riverside, and those of parents/teachers/etc, a few years back which devolved into bickering about how to have had access to a parent's copy is showing off your gross class privilege. I was slightly unnerved that didn't come up at all in this essay but still. I enjoy a good noodle around people's marginalia.

Catherine Denial (Hybrid Pedagogy), A Pedagogy of Kindness. On a change in pedagogical approach as a result of the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington.

Costica Bradatan (LARB), Why we fail and how. On the philosophy of failure (via Diogenes), and the failures of philosophy.

Paige Turner (own blog), 'Stop texting to see who your friends are' is just relationship testing.. This is both true, and... sometimes it is entirely reasonable to stop doing the initiating-lifting and see if the other party has any intention of picking up the load.

Ask A Manager, My office wants my pronouns but I'm still figuring it out.

Lauren Gutterman and Justin Bengry (Notches Blog), Her neighbour's wife: a history of lesbian desire within marriage. This is actually a youtube discussion, not sure if I included it in the listening post at the time.

Kai Cheng Thom (Xtra Magazine), Ask Kai: I want more sex than my partner does. How do I get my needs met without pushing her boundaries?. I just like how Kai writes about things, mostly.

Emily VanderWerff (Vox), How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.. You've all read this by now, I'm sure. On a recent-re-read I was struck by how Fall states that what she wanted was the story to be recieved as by one "who knows what it is to be a woman". It just struck me that... she apparently had no idea, and nor did Neil Clarke, that what the queer readership demands is that queer and trans stories be written by someone who knows what it is to be QUEER and/or trans. (Despite the transmisogyny involved in some of the worst "this feels like it was written by...", there were initially trans women who were suspicious of and parandoid about the story, too!) Is this good? Not entirely. But also, it's a strange sad tragedy to hang one's own gender identity on whether one's story is recieved as "by a woman". That's... not... how gender works. Or how writing works.

Ben Purkett, interviewing Bianca Stone (Guernica), Back draft: Bianca Stone and Ruth Stone. On poetry.

Jonathan Zittrain (The Atlantic), The Internet Is Rotting.

Elise Kinsella and Andy Burns (ABC Background Briefing), Mhelody Bruno's killer was jailed for 22 months. This is the information the court never heard. CN: murder of a trans woman. I don't normally post current affairs but this was, as well as topical at the time, a fascinating deep dive into how evidence gets excluded.

Michael Colbert (Electric Lit), The Leftovers is teaching me who I want to be after Covid. I don't want to watch this show, or indeed any show, but I liked this response to it.

Julia Skinner (JStor Daily), Libraries and Pandemics, past and present. On how the 1918 flu shaped libraries (US) as centres of community care.

Donna Mazza (The Conversation AU), Gender-ambiguous author Eve Langley is ripe for rediscovery: a new biography illuminates her difficult life. Appears to be no relation to Doreen Langley, but fascinating.

I have done... assorted stuff. And meanwhile I'm trying to move my documents and so on across to my new laptop.

Hence: LINKS.

Patrick Califa (Poz Magine, 1998), The Necessity of Excess. My goodness, this piece. I love so many things about it.

Elif Shafak, (Literary Review), review of Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Needs Saving.

Elif Shafak (Guardian UK), I used to feel my rage was righteous. But on its own, it can be toxic

BBC, June 2021, The couple rescuing the house they bought by accident. This amused me a lot.

This Twitter thread by Sasha Coward on LGBTQ+ lives/perspectives, where he talks about how having a baseline lived queer experience can make processing all sorts of things outside of "the box" a step easier.

Jenny Lawson (own blog), Nonbinary pronouns: it complicated, but wonderful things usually are. This is just a really very solidly good parent testimony - unlike many of the chirpy supportive ones, she talks honestly about both the challenges her child's coming out posed to her epistemology AND the practical challenges, but with the trademark self-deprecating humour that just... balances both really well.

Charlotte Moore (Glamour.com), How bisexual women are being failed by their partners

ABC radio national (June 2021), Polio was eliminated in the Asia-Pacific: then it came back. This was both a fascinating and sobering read

Gemma Tarlach (Atlas Obscure), The deep roots of the vegetable that took over the world. A whole article on brassica rapa!

Dominique K Reil (Zocalo Public Square), The historian and the murder trial. Both fascinating, and a sobering look at academic employment realities.

Kathryn Hymes, (The Atlantic), Your household'secret familylect

Hugh Ryan, (Harper's Bazaar), The Incredible True Adventure of Five Gay Activists in Search of the Black Panther Party

Julia Serano (own blog), Transgender people, bathrooms and sexual predators: what the data say. In case you need the cite, here it is.

Charmaine Chua (own blog, 2015), The Chinese logistical sublime and its wasted remains. More from that anthropological blog series on container shipping.

Elete N-F (Gal Dem), Queer lovers rock: the reality of nightlife for black gay women in 80s and 90s london

Kate Lister (inews UK), A brief history of oral sex from ancient china to DJ Khaled

Bobuq Sayed (Pedestrian.tv), Growing Up Non-Binary Has Taught Me How Fluid (And Damaging) Labels Can Be

Eve Rickert (own blog), A survivor's bill of rights. I'm still keeping half an eye on the fall-out from the Franklin Veaux debacle. Eve remains the most... forward-facing, imho, of the voices.

Rachel Gutman (Atlantic), I returned to the office and found a very old apple. And, eventually, ate it.

Kathryn Bond Stockton (QueerForty), Exerpt from "making out". I still haven't finished "The Queer Child" but now I really want to read her latest.

Clara Bradbury-Rice (clubdesfemmes), Lesbian Camp: But I’m a Cheerleader by Jamie Babbit

It's been so long since I did a reading post that I it feels really weird to try to preface this with commentary on the best or most arresting thing I've read lately.

Here's something that stood out to me, though: Siderea on The Problem of Morality. I had another one of those weird conversations with my parents the other day where I offhandedly said something, of an acquaintance with a strained parent relationship, "well, if I had a father who [x], I'm not sure I'd WANT to speak to him". Parents: "you can't just stop talking to people over political differences!"

And I'm astounded, repeatedly, because... this seems like an abdication of morality, or ethics, to me. And yet, as my parents occasionally get up the gumption to needle me about, I obviously don't think people should exclude *me* because I offend their morals. I feel like there's a difference between making that since on the basis of *private morality* (how I conduct my sex or relationship life - and even then, as in the case of spousal abuse, there ARE reasons to stop talking to people over their private morality!), and over... political morality? Ethics? Something?

Siderea doesn't get into that particular distinction, but DOES contend that the "left", broadly defined, abdicated the field of morality-as-politics in the 80s, and is now hampered by that loss. And makes this very useful (for talking with older generations, at least) distinction:

And a good bit of that, I seem to recall, was back then it was less universal that the attraction of either party was moral positions. There were lots of people in both parties who were motivated by a purely pragmatic sense of public policy, and voted for the party or even the candidate whose policies they thought would be most effective for bringing about changes they thought were personally advantageous. For instance, one might believe a laissez-faire approach to markets was the best thing for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Republicans who advocated a hands-off policy towards the economy; or one might believe that government intervention was better for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Democrats who argued for that. Back when I was a frosh in college, that was actually a really common way young people aligned themselves politically!

As best I can tell that's completely untenable now. It doesn't matter what you think about monetary policy, your choices are the party which believes that extrajudicial killing of peaceable innocent citizens by the police is murder and the party that does not. And, as I explained above, morality overrules other considerations, like which approach to market regulation is most efficacious for prosperity.

The nature of the conflict we are now in is moral. And we need the conceptual tools of morality to even see it clearly, much less have any leverage on it.

The "pragmatics" approach to voting took longer to become untenable in Aus, and now we also have the problem where BOTH major parties hold some morally abhorrent policies because it's a race to the bottom.* And with the relatively lower profile of, eg, extra-judicial police homicide (it happens, it happens primarily to Indigenous people, followed by Middle Eastern and African Australians, but it's less frequent on a sheer numbers level, shifted toward less visible modes - deaths in custody - and simply getting less traction because, on a percentage level, Australia is whiter and more complacent), and the _not quite as bad_ wealth gap, means that it's possible to still be complacent middle class (perhaps especially if, like my parents, you achieved that status over your working life: things went right and are still going right for you) and think of political choices as matters of pragmatics and priorities.

*For that matter, I'm not convinced by Siderea's presentation of the 'extrajudicial murder of innocent citizens by the police: okay or no' as something that one US party firmly opposes and one supports. Are US democratic politicians actually putting forth platforms to end qualified immunity, or is it "fund the police more to take more anti-bias training, and ho and hum?"

Meanwhile, I got back into work with a six-hour binge in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. I give you: one of the odder things I found, a long poem entitled "Bibliotheca, a Poem Occasioned by the Sight of A Modern Library. With Some Very Useful Episodes and Digressions", by Thomas Newcomb:



The text is online here. It isn't very good.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: Greenwald's 'Cleanness', but very much on hiatus.
Non-fiction for personal interest: 'The Body Keeps the Score', also hiatus.
Lit Mag: Nothing right now
Poetry: Ditto. I did very much enjoy the poem My Queer by Emma Rhodes, in Plenitude Magazine, not least because I, too, named a doll after a very beautiful little girl of my acquaintance.
For work: Not nearly enough, but for mixed work-personal reasons I started Jen Manions "Female Husbands: A Trans History". I'm really enjoying it, although Manion's use of "to trans gender" as a verb grates, and I really don't think it was contexualised early enough, or given a strong enough justification when it was addressed.

Recently Finished: For certain values of 'recent'.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I liked this a lot, but I didn't find it as utterly arresting as I had expected - I think because, ultimately, I've been reading in a post-Carter world since my teens.

I was surprised, and delighted, by the DuMaurier-esque feel of the title story. My favourites were probably the weirder ones toward the end - The Erl-King, and the triple sequence of Red Riding Hood-and-or-werewolf tales that come last, of which, the weird sexy 'The Company of Wolves' would be my favourite.

Anne quitte son île by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read this in the RadioCanada Oh!Dio audiolivre version. Loved it, as usual - although LMM sure does over-sell the ease of convincing two tomcats to cohabitate with one another!


Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature by Nicole Nolan Sidhu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really interesting, and I'm having a productive and challenging time wrestling with the wide difference between her take on the Reeve's Tale and that of other feminist scholars.

Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak by Helen Davies

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This wasn't actually what I was after, research-wise, but had some cool stuff in it anyway, especially an essay by Kate Fox, in the form of a dialogue, on the topic of autistic stand-up comedy.

Anne au Domaine des peupliers by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another really enjoyable audiolivre from Radio Canada. And as usual when re-reading this one as an adult, I'm really uncomfortable with the number of abusive parents who feature in the "humourous" community plots. It's also notable that the abusive mother is agreed to be not a NICE person, whereas Anne ends up concluding that both the abusive fathers are decent chaps after all. :s

Online Fiction:

Megan Arkenberg, In the City of Kites and Crows reprint/podcast at Glittership

Megan Arkenberg, All the King's Monsters, Clarkesworld, with audio.

Megan Arkenberg, Lessons from a clockwork queen, reprint/podcast at Glittership

Sarah Gailey, Tiger Lawyer gets it right, EscapePod

Aimee Ogden, In September, Podcastle

E.P. Tuazon, Barong, The Rumpus. I did not fully understand this but I liked it!

Bryan Washington, Foster, The New Yorker. A good cat story.

Erin Kate Ryan, The Girl Was Already On Fire, VQR.

Kavita Bedford, The Daintree.

Up Next: You know what this section gives me anxiety, let's cut it out entirely. No more 'up next' bits. Henceforth this section shall be...

Recently added to the endless TBR: Tempted to break my nigh-moratorium on both modern-setting romance novels and m/f romance novels for For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes; delighted to find a nerdy travelogue by someone who isn't a white man, namely, Monisha Rajesh's Around the World in 80 Trains.

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Some links!

Susan Misicka, SwissInfo, I hear if it's not running: a profile of Martin Horath, who's worked on the Mt Rigi cogwheel railway for 25 years.

Justin Myers, British GQ, The Friend Zone has more meaning than you think.

Sarah Scire, Nieman Lab, Someone wrong on the internet? Correcting them publicly may make them act like a bigger jerk.

Carissa Harris, Aeon Mag, 800 years of rape culture. Smart public writing from feminist medieval studies.

Emillie Colyer, Meanjin blog, What I'm reading. I liked that she talked about the fragmentary nature of writing as an academic: "Because I’m doing a PhD, I am reading a lot of different things all at once, greedy for the thoughts of others".

Jonathan Parks-Rammage, Electric Lit, 7 queer books with heart-stopping twists

Dianna Anderson, Rewire News, Purity Culture as Rape Culture. Been following Diana for a while now, and finding their takes on evangelical culture very insightful.

Hilary Brenhouse, interview with Elissa Washuta, Guernica, Elissa Washuta: living inside this empire is all that I will ever have

That's by no means everything, but I have a kitten to exorcise. Happy Sunday, folks.