What Are You Reading Wednesday

[highlyeccentric]

There's a reason that I used to do these fortnightly: when I'm actually having a life, I may finish three books in a fortnight, but usually all at the /end/ of the fortnight, leading to a lot of 'well I read stuff but finished nothing' posts.

Currently Reading:
Fiction: At Swim Two Boys (... slowly); Giovanni's Room (picking up pace now); The Dressmaker of Draper's Lane (doggedly because it's an ARC)
Non-Fiction: Victoria Blud, 'The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Europe'
Lit mag: Meanjin 77.3

I'm reading Meanjin online (I have a subscription, although this time I didn't even start reading until after most of it was out from behind the paywall), and enjoying it. Because it's online I can recommend and link!

Bruce Pascoe - Australia: Temper and Bias: a polemic, drawing on Pascoe's extensive work on indigenous foodways.

What omission? Well let’s look at what the explorers reported of the Aboriginal agricultural economy and see if you can remember any priest, parent or professor alluding to it. Lieutenant Grey in his 1839 ‘exploration’ of parts of Western Australia, so far unseen by Europeans, saw yam gardens more than five kilometres wide and extending a distance past the horizon and because the land had been so deeply tilled he could not walk across it. Sir Thomas Mitchell in the country that is now the Queensland–New South Wales border area rode through 17 kilometres of stooked grain that his fellows described as being like an English field of harvest. Isn’t that word ‘stook’ interesting when applied to what we thought we knew about Aboriginal history?

Isaac Batey saw that the hillsides of Melbourne were terraced in the process of yam production and that the tilth of the soil was so light you could run your fingers through it. Mitchell saw these yam fields stretching as far as he could see near Gariwerd (Grampians). He extolled the beauty of these plains assuming that God had made them so that he could ‘discover’ them, not once thinking how peculiar it was for the best soil in the country to have almost no trees. This was a managed field of harvest. George Augustus Robinson saw women stretched across those same fields of horticulture in the process of harvesting the tubers.

Belinda Rule - All times are the same time, a response to the odious Shannon Burns piece about how *he* was manipulated into having sex as a teenager and he's fine, so everyone else should stop whining. (Infer content warnings from topic)

It strikes me in writing this that I would never make this kind of intervention with a friend. If a male friend sat me down and disclosed that an adult woman had sex with him when he was 15 against his will, but he’s perfectly fine and he doesn’t see what the big deal is, I would keep my response neutral and my opinion to myself. My opinion would very likely be that he was in denial, but to say so would be obnoxious: claiming that you know what is going on in someone’s head better than they do is pretty insulting.

However, if he began proposing to write an article in a prestigious literary journal suggesting that other people who claim to be traumatised by similar experiences are whingers with a victim mentality and a prudish attitude towards sex, and furthermore ought to be grateful for the moral growth opportunity the assault offered them, at that point I would have to throw tact to the wind and strongly advise the friend against it.

This is the part that sticks with me. Rule so carefully walks through her experiences, and the experiences of people *like* Burns, without pronouncing on what Burns did or did not experience, and so carefully frames her comments. But someone at Meanjin should have said all this to Burns before it ever got to print. I am starting to suspect that Meanjin (and I guess really I mean Jonathan Green) publish Shannon Burns because they get to BOTH get his controversial class-is-the-worst-oppression-everything-else-is-fluff rhetoric *AND* then publish smart women and/or POC writing in counterpoint (see also: Kelly Cheung's Children of the Tall Ships, Winter 2018).

Fatima Measham, a fascinating, insightful piece from someone raised Catholic in the Philipines on the relationship between the Catholic church and institutional power, at various points in recent history.

Religious power presents a paradox, in that it is most powerful when it is exercised least; it accrues where it is shed. As Marc Gopin points out, ‘The less power organised religion has, the more its clerics, both lowly and powerful, become voices of conscience and enlightenment. The more power they have, the worse they become, and the more their progress is retarded.’

The work of conscience and charity is not power-seeking, which means it gets lost in the fray. What people hear more often instead are the cultural agitations of a white Christian class. The moral authority of the Catholic Church has also been made brittle by the unconscionable choices of generations of men, so even its good works cannot be held up without seeming to be a patch-up.

This is... worth reading if you're of the automatic assumption that church institutional power is bad. She doesn't shy away from the worst implications, and IMHO what's missing is an investigation into how the catholic church handles abuse by priests *in countries with strong liberation theology traditions*. Better? Worse? Why or why not? (My expectation would be 'about the same', but perhaps not...)

Recently Finished: Nothing. Big fat zip.

Up Next: Ugh so many ARCs. Plus my physical TBR is overflowing again! And I have library books!

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Other Media: Still enjoying The Penumbra Podcast - working through the Second Citadel episodes.

Music: Slightly confused to report that I really like Zayn's new album, Icarus Falls. I looked it up 100% because my inner sixteen year old REQUIRES I consume melodramatic Icarus references, but... like... it's Good. Currently I'm two for two on liking ex-1D member's solo albums.